Tanzu Talk

We've all seen those Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys ("On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product or service...") in our consumer lives. But what if platform teams collected NPS as a metric for developer satisfaction? In this episode, Mick Pollard (@aussielunix, which I totally mispronounced as "aussie linux"... think UNIX!) shares how using NPS shifted the mindset of a platform team. Instead of measuring on velocity, the team ran a simple NPS survey and was shocked at what they found. Mick shares what the NPS represents, as well as how to go about running the survey. He also shares what needs to happen before and after the survey to build trust with developers and turn the metric into impact. Tune in to hear his recipe for success. For complete show notes, go here: https://content.pivotal.io/podcasts/the-art-and-science-of-developer-net-promoter-scores-for-platform-teams

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Designers play a critical role in software development. They impact not just what users see on the screen, but impact important decisions about product direction. In this episode of Pivotal Conversations, Nate Clinton, managing director at Designit, a unit of Wipro, and Tim McCoy, Senior Director of Design at Pivotal, talk about the evolution of design thinking in software development and share best practices for designing modern software.

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Validating your assumptions about app features is one of the core benefits of proper product thinking. This means testing out your design theories, but also testing out higher level, strategic questions. Pivotal's Alex Tran walks us through it all. He also goes over a few examples, mapping metrics to design, discover and framing (D&F), and discusses the idea of product vs. project.

In 2017, Rachel Stephens of Redmonk wrote a great piece about how technical debt is an incomplete analogy. But she agrees that it shouldn't be abandoned. In this episode, she and I expound on the analogy to its breaking points, including liquidity, derivatives, and the perpetual state of refinancing we're all in. See full show notes at: https://content.pivotal.io/podcasts/continuous-refinancing-of-your-tech-debt-with-rachel-stephens-of-redmonk Register for SpringOne Platform today and save an extra $200 with S1P200_DDREWITZ.

Learn more: Apache Kafka Confluent Pivotal Follow everyone on Twitter: Intersect (@IntersectIT) Neha Narkhede (@nehanarkhede) Derrick Harris (@derrickharris) Apache Kafka (@apachekafka) Confluent (@confluentinc) Pivotal (@pivotal)

The platform team at The Home Depot has many years of experience running Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Returning guest Tony McCully tells us how it's being used and managed now, plus some compliance automation and process tuning the team has been working on. We also discuss how the team is thinking about using kubernetes. Also, egg salad, carrots, and mustard.

At CF Summit 2019 in Philadelphia, I sat down with Jon Ravenscraft (@Jon_Ravenscraft) and Nick Kuhn (@tehkuhnz ) from Kroger to see what was interesting to them from the event and what was on their list to play around with once they got back home. What ensued was a survey of the many ways that Cloud Foundry is evolving. From Eirini, to Buildpacks, to ISM, to Knative.. they all come back to making developers productive. See the complete show notes and links to Jon and Nick's favorite talks from CF Summit at: Article URL: https://content.pivotal.io/podcasts/making-the-right-thing-easy-with-jon-ravenscraft-and-nick-kuhn-of-kroger

What's life without a little chaos? And why not a little chaos impacting your production systems? Sounds scary, but turns out intentionally introducing random errors into production systems helps identify vulnerabilities so you can do something about them before they result in major disruptions. In this episode of Pivotal Conversations, Gremlin's Tammy Butow, one of the leading practitioners of chaos engineering (as the practice is known), talks about the benefits of and shares best practices for introducing chaos to your production systems.

In this episode, Captain Bryon Kroger of the U.S. Air Force's Kessel Run dispells myths about the so-called "frozen middle," and finding resistance—and support—from all levels in an organization. He also shares some of the practices he's used to retain support for ongoing change, including growth boards and collecting feedback quickly.

This week I've got a discussion about DevOps I had with Nate and Paul. I've been curious about the changing nature of DevOps as SRE and platform operations comes into vogue. It seems like the idea of "full stack" DevOps is being dimension...and maybe DevOps itself? Maybe now it's just OpsOps. We also talk about enterprise architecture and governance in the age of decoupled, event-driven, microservices. And somewhere in there, we talk about how culture gets changed and who needs to do it.

Nobody likes to be uncomfortable, by definition. And experienced software developers and architects, like all of us, want all the answers. "But if you are really trying to achieve the agility that transformation promises, you have to let go of some of that," says Bob Cunningham, Senior Manager, Enterprise Application Architecture at TD Ameritrade. In this episode of Pivotal Conversations, recorded on the floor of Cloud Foundry Summit 2019 in Philadelphia, Bob chats about his experience leading digital transformation efforts at the online brokerage, including the importance of being comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Microsoft Build brought a bevy of Windows news this week, plus, there's some more Windows support in Pivotal land and an overview of Pivotal Cloud Foundry's road-map. Our guest is Derrick Harris who's recently joined Pivotal and runs the CIO crib-notes news site Intersect. Additional topics: Coté might have a tape-worm. In Europe, pizzas are sandwiches. Images in RT's. Coffee and chicken AI/ML. "Will robots come for our jobs, Derrick?" GoGrid, Joyent. "Application first." Boring AI. Edge computing.

Enterprises across industries are modernizing legacy applications to improve performance and provide great customer experiences. But it doesn't how snappy your application is or how pretty the user interface if the data supporting the application can't keep up. In this episode of Pivotal Conversations, Redis Labs' Adi Foulger and Cassie Zimmerman talk about the challenges of modernizing your data architecture.

Five years into their journey with Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Liberty Mutual is not standing still. Talking with Jai Schniepp, Senior Product Owner of Secure DevOps Platforms at Liberty Mutual, Dormain learns how the team keeps iterating. Not resting on their laurels from their initial foray into pipeline generators, Jai's team have iterated to solve more of the developer experience in a secure way.

Dick's Sporting Goods has been on an accelerated journey to "own their own destiny" when it comes to digital. But this isn't just e-commerce: this transformation includes melting the barriers between brick-and-mortar and e-commerce teams, as well as literally bringing down the walls between groups working on digital at DSG.

There's a lot of "backing services" in Cloud Foundry: not only middleware like databases, but also operations services like auto-scaling. This week, Richard & Coté talk with Laurel Gray, the product manager for those services at Pivotal. We discuss the services themselves, the open service broker, how to product manage APIs and services, and product management in general. Also, we hop-scotch through the news: a new version of Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Google's recently cloud announcements, and a new version of kubernetes.

We've touched on the mindset shift of treating your internal application platform as a product (or offering) for your developers. In this episode, Dormain talks to James Urquhart about defining the go-to-market strategy of that offering. Have you built the right service? What does my MVP look like? How do we educate, broadcast, and onboard developers? This conversation builds upon previous episodes on the topic of "platform as product." We refer to the episode with Paula Kennedy, as well as Dormain's post on "How to Get Developers to Start Using Your Application Platform." https://content.pivotal.io/podcasts/for-platform-teams-the-developers-are-the-customer-with-pivotals-paula-kennedy https://content.pivotal.io/blog/how-to-get-developers-to-start-using-your-application-platform

Most enterprises start their cloud-native journeys with lots of enthusiasm and big plans. But reality often sets in when they try to scale transformations by modernizing hundreds, sometimes thousands of legacy apps. The biggest digital transformation roadblock? It's a lack of cloud-native skills, says HCL's Alan Flower. In this episode of Pivotal Conversations, Alan shares tips and strategies for overcoming the cloud-native skills gap.

Demonstrating the value of software, how it contributes to revenue, is no easy feat. Staffing can be difficult, especially with an eye to sustaining teams over the years. Jon Osborn returns as a guest to discuss these and other transformation hurdles, plus successes they've had at the Great American Insurance Group.

There are a number of changes to process and culture needed to be good at software development, and one of the most challenging for many enterprises is creating a team dedicated to the platform and treating it as a product. But that, says Pivotal's Paula Kennedy, is a major predictor of success. "The [Pivotal] customers that are the most successful are those that have their own dedicated team with its own dedicated product manager," says Kennedy. "Those are the ones that are able to prioritize, able to meet users needs, able to release features quickly." Listen on for this and other insights from Paula, a member of Pivotal's PCF Solutions team, on best practices for platform teams to successfully adopt platform-as-product.

Each year, the CF Summit brings together users, customers, and other community members. Dormain gives us a tour of the conference with some highlights. Plus, we cover some recent news and talk about open source foundations.

In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Stark & Wayne's Dr. Nic Williams discusses why it's important to treat your platform-as-product. The short answer: It results in a more customer-oriented mindset. Listen to the full episode to learn more, including how putting some constraints on developers plays an important role.

This week, we talk with James Urquhart who joined Pivotal recently in the CTO group. We talk about some architectural ideas for converting the enterprise over to an event-driven flow, discuss the reasons for doing multi-cloud, and also what kinds of conversations "executives" find helpful. Coté does a great job mangling Pivotal product names. Also, hot takes on "on-premises" vs. "on-premise."

In this episode of Pivotal Insights, Helpful.com's Farhan Thawar* talks about the challenges of building a company from scratch, why it's important to apply smart architectural principals to empower development teams, and why he strives for boring infrastructure. *Editor's note: Helpful.com was acquired by Shopify following the recording of this episode but before its publication. Farhan and the entire Helpful.com team joined Shopify where they continue to pursue their mission of making communication and collaboration more seamless and effective.

While they are both big and hulking, unlike the dinosaurs the mainframe still walks among us. In this episode of Pivotal Insights, our own Michael Minella makes the case for mainframe modernization and shares lessons learned from the field.

Getting the blinking cursor of kubernetes up and running is only half the job: the other is actually running software in it. While at SpringOne Tour Charlotte, Paul Czarkowski walks Coté through how that's done using the classic Spring Music and Pet store applications. We also discuss burger innovation in Charlotte and the thumb method.

Duke Energy has been working on their software capabilities for some time now. They've recently reached a milestone by opening a brand new innovation center in Charlotte. Coté took a tour of it recently checking out the numerous product teams and their approach to exploring and building strategy, all the way from corporate strategy down to writing code. John also shares a couple of new examples of how lean product management and design in action. Also: gingham.

This week our guests are Dan Stevenson and Brandon Zaharoff from Shields Health Solutions, a maker of software solutions for the specialty pharmacy industry. Dan and Brandon talk about the challenges of developing and running a specialty pharmacy, how Shields' software helps ensure patients are taking their medications as directed, and how and why Shields adopted cloud-native software development to build and evolve its flagship product, TelemetryRX.

Few organizations have or rely on as much software the US Air Force. There's plenty of it around and, thus, plenty to be improved. In recent years, one of the more spectacular digital transformation stories has come from the USAF's work modernizing their Air Operations Control software. In this episode, USAF's Bryon Kroger goes over how they've moved multi-year release cycles to just weeks in the Kessel Run projects. Much of the work is in the "fuzzy front" end of planning and procurement, but as Bryon says, an equally, hearty serving has to do with building up people's skills, moral, and the overall culture.

This week, Pivotal's Mik Freedman and Joey Sabani, both members of the Agile Practice Leadership Enablement team, join Jeff and Dormain to talk about Pivotal's joint work with Accenture, the global consulting firm. This includes collaboration in Accenture's Innovation Hub in Columbus, Ohio, where Pivotal and Accenture work side-by-side with clients to help them scale their digital transformations.

Knate-ive by Pivotal Software

How's your year go? Pretty good? Well, regardless, it's almost over, so that means it's time for some predictions! Before Richard and Coté go over some hopes and dreams for 2019, they review some 2018 predictions. Some didn't work out at all, some were exactly correct, but, as always, most of them were in the ballpark. Also, the mystery of why we have a flat-head screw driver when the phillips is so clearly superior.

In this week's episode of Pivotal Conversations, Dormain and Jeff chat with Greg Meyer, a distinguished engineer at Cerner, a maker of healthcare software. Greg talks about a new specification he helped develop to achieve interoperability and easier data movement between healthcare systems. He also explains how the company is modernizing its development practices to increase the pace of innovation.

Flexible software usually means well modularized software. Instead of one big ball of code, you want to create components that work together. Dividing up your application into those components has always been a bugbear of design and it's what domain-driven design (DDD) is trying to solve. In this episode, Coté talks with Jakub Pilimon to figure out what DDD is, plus how event storming is used to find domains. Also, outside of Poland, is it "evangelist" or "advocate"?

There's few tasks harder than refactoring a large organization, but that's exactly what we're asking management to do in all this digital transformation hoopla. Existing organizations are tremendously conflicted and tied up in competing incentives already, and then when you try to shift to a product team driven approach, things go even more haywire. Here, Richard & Coté talk with Pivotal's Carl Coryell-Martin who's been pulling apart that bureaucratic bowl of spaghetti for many years now.

From all the stories at SpringOne Platform you get the feeling that every organization out there is doing a real bang-up job with improving their software capabilities. Of course, it's not actually everyone out there, but each year we hear about more enterprises and government agencies that are using their own, custom written software to improve their business and operations. In this episode, Richard and Coté go over some of their highlights from SpringOne Platform 2018, cover some of the news (PCF 2.3 and PKS 1.2), and a few other news items in the infrastructure and cloud world.

Perhaps the phrase "business transformation" is what we should say instead of "digital transformation." If the goal of IT transformation is to switch over your organization from an operations, service provider to a product-centric approach, it fits better. While at SpringOne Platform 2018, I talked with West's Thomas Squeo about how West has been making this shift from an IT-as-operators and project gnomes to end-to-end product people. We also discuss the other side of the transformation, how the product people and the executive team learn about technologies like containers and microservices and start thinking about how those innovations let them change the core business. Thomas also gives advice on the career path to becoming a CTO: build up a diverse career path instead of sticking in just one lane.

It's easy to understand what kind of IT culture you need if you're going to improve how you do software, but how do you actually change such a squishy thing? While at SpringOne Platform 2018, I talked with Kyle Campose about how he's done it. We also talk about the phrase "digital transformation" and some sandwich ontology.

You often hear about the "product manager," but rarely about what they actually do day-to-day. This episode we talk with Pivotal's Jonathan Sirlin about product management using several examples of applications and organizations he's worked with. He talks in-depth about one application he and team worked on, covering the process they used to find, prioritize, and then create features and software.

"More and more, we see that more traditional, enterprise-y use cases start to fall into these categories," Mark Fisher, Pivotal. Few topics are driving more interest than "serverless." Pivotal has been working on a function framework called Project Riff for awhile. At its core, it's an event driven model for building applications. Recently, the team announced that riff works on knative. We discuss riff, knative, and serverless in general. There's also a little bit of news this week, and some herring history.

"As designers, we think about the why and understanding the human experience, empathizing, and observing, and being curious, and trying to understand what are those important touch-points between a person and technology." We finally talk about design in this episode with Salomé Mortazavi. She goes in-depth into what design is for software, how it operates in a very user centric way, what it's like to pair in designing, tools Pivotal design people use, and modeling how to track the success and quality of design. Also, we talk about umbrella and rain-jacket style in Seattle. No one uses umbrellas, and you just need one rain-jacket, unless you want to match with your shoes. Full show notes: https://content.pivotal.io/podcasts

SpringOne platform is coming up quick - next month! - so Richard and Coté do their annual favorite talks review. There's talk on agile, pipelines, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Spring, case studies, and so many more they don't have time to discuss. In recent news, Knative was recently announced which is wangling to be "the building blocks for running serverless workloads on kubernetes," as Google's DeWitt Clinton put it. Richard and Coté discuss knative, Istio, and how "serverless" seems to now mean just any old type of programming, but with containers and all that cloud native stuff. They also discuss container registries. Also, European toilet paper and beds.

There's a lot of new features in Pivotal Cloud Foundry 2.2 from kubernetes updates to security. This week, we talk with Jared Ruckle about those features, plus a new white paper on the Open Service Broker API. As always, we also talk about recent infrastructure software news and manage to throw in some house packing tips as well.

We talk databases in this episode. First, with the history of databases and why the relational database become king, for awhile at least, and then about how databases evolved, ending up talking about Greenplum. Greenplum is the world’s first fully-featured, multi-cloud, massively parallel processing (MPP) data platform based on the open source. With Ivan Novick, we go over all that and cover some use cases. Also, as always, some recent infrastructure software news.

Every successful organization is faced with a daunting task: modernizing your legacy applications and services. The benefits of cloud native are alluring, to be sure, but modernizing your existing applications can seem impossible. Sarah Ehmann & Rohit Kelapure go over Pivotal's App Transformation methodology to get you over that hump. Full show notes: http://pivotal.io/podcast

In this episode, among other topics, Richard and Coté cover some recent kubernetes news, cloud native .Net, and tips for making business travel more enjoyable.

During a discussion of South East Asian good, Coté & Josh Long manager to talk about Josh's book, Cloud Native Java (co-written by Kenny Bastani). They go over some of the less well discussed sections, like instrumentation and monitoring applications. In doing so, they discuss opentracing, Zipkin, Sleuth, and how developers should both code and use for better tracing. There's some nuanced detail on monitoring versus tracing as well. Also, we discuss how relational databases are traditional tacos, while all these new data stores are fusion tacos.

An enterprise application of any significance will end up needing to work with legacy systems. It's often legacy code itself! Dealing with legacy code brings its own challenges, which Coté & Rahul discuss. Most of it has to do with getting a high confidence in your tests, which is a devilish problem for legacy code. We also, of course, discuss food in Singapore. This episode was recorded at Voxxed Days Singapore. http://pivotal.io/podcast