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Tag: Pivotal

  • Pivotal Embraces Spinnaker for Continous Delivery

    Pivotal Embraces Spinnaker for Continous Delivery

    Pivotal Software has added support for the Spinnaker continuous delivery platform to its platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment for the open source Cloud Foundry PaaS.

    Richard Seroter, vice president of product marketing at Pivotal, said version 2.6 of Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) extends the reach of the Spinnaker CD platform developed by Netflix to its PaaS environment and Enterprise PKS, an instance of Kubernetes curated by Pivotal and its sister company, VMware.

    At the same time, the latest version of PAS adds support for a beta instance of custom sidecar processes, which enable developers to embed additional functions running in an isolated container directly within their applications. That capability makes it possible to deploy, for example, a service mesh within the application, said Seroter.

    Finally, Pivotal plans to add multicenter replication capabilities for MySQL databases and a permissions model to Concourse for PCF, a continuous integration tool for building application pipelines with a Pivotal CF environment. That latter capability provides a mechanism through which DevOps teams can automate application updates, including patches, end to end, Seroter noted. As more patches are released to address the growing number of critical flaws involving microprocessors that make use of hyperthreading, the ability to automate their deployment is now more critical than ever, he said.

    Pivotal is seeing the deployment of both traditional 12-factor applications and more modern containerized applications on its PaaS environment. At the same time, the Cloud Foundry Foundation, which oversees the development of the Cloud Foundry PaaS, has,  via Project Eirini, made it possible to deploy containers that rely on Kubernetes rather than the Diego orchestration platform developed for Cloud Foundry. However, Eirini is still an alpha project and Pivotal has not yet fully committed to a specific level of support for Kubernetes with its overall PaaS strategy.

    In the meantime, Seroter said PCF continues to gain momentum in organizations looking to build and deploy software much like a technology company. As more organizations realize how dependent they are on software to drive revenue, they want to rely on a platform that makes it easier for them to manage software development and deployment platforms at scale, he noted.

    As part of that effort, Pivotal Software is aggressively incorporating tools that will enable organizations using its PaaS to implement best DevOps process. Many have adopted various modern development platforms in isolation but continue to rely on the Cloud Foundry PaaS to automate the building and deployment of mission-critical applications. Now, two classes of development platforms are merging into a single entity that makes it easier to embrace agile development methodologies using a lightweight development platform.

    Whatever the outcome, PaaS environments are not going away anytime soon. However, what organizations perceive as the role a PaaS environment plays in any enterprise soon might expand considerably as more container technologies are infused into the platform.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Pivotal Software Embraces OpenJDK

    Pivotal Software Embraces OpenJDK

    Pivotal Software has officially thrown its weight behind OpenJDK, the open source version of the standard edition of Java, by adding support for OpenJDK to the Pivotal Spring Runtime on its Spring framework.

    At the same time, Pivotal announced it is extending its commercial support for open source Apache Tomcat servers in addition to providing commercial support for all the major open source Spring projects, including Spring Framework, Spring Boot, Spring Cloud and Spring Cloud Dataflow.

    Since 2011, Oracle, IBM and SAP have been making a case for employing OpenJDK. Ryan Morgan, vice president of engineering for the application platform at Pivotal, said that while other languages have become increasingly popular, the primary workhorse for building back-end applications in the enterprise remains Java. Now that Oracle has formally relinquished control over Java source code to The Eclipse Foundation, research and development into the legacy programming environment should accelerate. Oracle retains licensing rights to the name Java, but versions 8 and higher of Java Enterprise Edition are being converted to an open source platform known as Jakarta.

    Morgan said much of the work going forward would be focused on modernizing monolithic Java applications to make it either to turn them into microservices or at least make it easier for microservices developed in other languages to make calls via application programming interfaces (APIs) to those back-end applications. As enterprise IT organizations make the shift, they increasingly will rely on DevOps processes to manage the transition. The effort should accelerate the extent to which many organizations will need to rely on modern best DevOps practices.

    As both OpenJDK and Jakarta continue to move forward, Morgan said Pivotal is committed to continuing investment in the Spring framework, which has done much to make developing Java applications a much more agile endeavor. The most immediate benefit, of course, is the reduction of licensing fees associated with employing Java platforms. Many IT organizations that have mandated open source code-first and adopted alternative programming languages now may want to reconsider their options, especially when the number of developers who know how to write applications in more modern languages is comparatively small.

    Of course, it will take many years for enterprise IT organizations to fully make this transition. In the meantime, many of them will continue developing applications in Java simply because they have large teams that have mastered a programming construct that has been in place for three decades or more. Many of those same organizations may be making greater use of rival programming constructs, but Java and its descendants will play a major role in the enterprise well into the next decade. The primary challenge Pivotal will face is maintaining dominance of the frameworks employed to build new applications based on Jakarta and OpenJDK, in addition to updated existing Java applications.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Pivotal Software Previews Automation Framework

    Pivotal Software Previews Automation Framework

    At the North America Cloud Foundry Summit 2019 conference, Pivotal Software announced it is beta testing an automation framework that promises to keep its distribution of the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment continuously updated.

    In addition, Pivotal revealed it will be adding support for open source technologies including Envoy load balancing and Istio service mesh software developed outside the auspices of the Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF) to its Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) distribution. Envoy and Istio are being employed to add a new routing tier to tier to PCF to give developers more control over network traffic.

    Richard Seroter, vice president of product for Pivotal, said Platform Automation for PCF consists of a series of building block modules that will be applied to all the components of PCF as well as eventually the distribution of Kubernetes that Pivotal curates in collaboration with sister company VMware.

    Pivotal also announced that Pivotal Application Service (PAS), the runtime for PCF, will soon support Windows Server 2019 along with the ability to configure multiple custom ports per PAS container to make deploying containerized applications in a PaaS environment more efficient from a networking perspective.

    Finally, Pivotal is adding more descriptive metadata to the application programming interfaces (API) it exposes across the PAS runtime.

    Seroter said Pivotal continues to focus on automating as much of the IT operations pipeline as possible. Rather than allocating IT staff to create and manage these pipelines, Pivotal is making a case for relying on a set of managed services that span instances of Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes running on top of virtual machines deployed on either a public cloud or on-premises. That approach relies on a highly opinionated operational pipeline defined by Pivotal that IT organizations will need to adopt to benefit from a highly consistent and repeatable approach to managing IT operations at scale, he said.

    The need for a more structured approach to managing IT operations is only becoming more acute as organizations embrace Kubernetes platforms alongside Kubernetes, Seroter added. In fact, a survey of 501 IT leaders published by the CFF finds almost half of respondents (48%) report using some combination of PaaS, containers and serverless technologies together.

    It’s still unclear how much IT organizations will standardize on a particular application development platform. PaaS environments typically have a more robust set of application development tools, but they can consume tens of virtual machines to stand up. Development tools for Kubernetes platforms are still evolving, but the platform provides a more efficient way to consume both virtual machines and bare-metal servers. It is apparent that for some time to come that many IT organizations will find themselves managing multiple platforms. The challenge that creates for DevOps teams is finding a way to manage those platforms consistently using a common framework rather than having to deploy and master separate management. It may take quite a while for IT leaders to rationalize their management platforms, but with each passing day it becomes clearer that goal increasingly is within reach.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Microservices Days coming to a city near you

    Microservices Days coming to a city near you

    Microservices is rapidly becoming a design paradigm for developing software. While there are many benefits to microservices designs, it is more complex than traditional application design. For this reason we are formulating a new community around microservices architecture. This community will explore design issues and the intersection with Mobile/IoT, Containers, Cloud, DevOps and APIs.

    Microservices Journal is a newly-launched online community where practitioners can share their experiences and learn from others.

    Microservices Days are a series of regionally delivered one-day seminars led by practitioners.

    Who should attend: CIO/CTO, Application Development Management, Software Engineers, DevSecOps, and IT Operations.

    For our 11/16 program we are lucky to have some strong industry experienced speakers come speak:
    • Michael Cote – Pivotal
    • JP Morgenthal – DXC.technology
    • Deepak Kulkarni – Charles Schwab & Co
    • Irakli Nadarishvilli and Mark Donovan – CapitalOne
    • Ryan Bagnulo – Guarden.io

    This is a great opportunity to come hear from early adopters and learn from their experiences.

    Register Now: http://www.innotechconferences.com/austin/about-2/microservices-day/

    Microservices Days, Austin – Agenda

    Time Presentation 
    8:00am
    9:30am – 10:15am
    10:20am – 11:05am
    jpmorgenthal
    11:10am – 12:00pm Deepak_Kulkarni

    12 Factors for the Enterprise
    12:00pm – 1:00pm Lunch and Expo
    1:00pm – 1:45pm Microservices_Irakli_MarkImplementing Microservices at Capital One
    2:30pm – 3:20pm TBA
    3:30pm – 4:20pm RyanBagnulo
    Microservices Maturity Matrix, Token Authentication & API Gateway Mediation

     Register Now: http://www.innotechconferences.com/austin/about-2/microservices-day/

    — JP Morgenthal

  • Pivotal Enlists Rackspace to Advance DevOps in Cloud Foundry Environments

    Pivotal Enlists Rackspace to Advance DevOps in Cloud Foundry Environments

    In a sign of the level of complexity now associated with managing DevOps, Pivotal has partnered with Rackspace to create a managed services practice for its distribution of the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment.

    Ian Andrews, vice president of product for Pivotal, says that at least half of the company’s customers have a least one instance of Pivotal Cloud Foundry (CF) that they would like to have managed by a third party. The reason for that is two-fold. For one, the Cloud Foundry PaaS can be complex for many IT organizations to deploy and manage on their own; Andrews notes that Pivotal releases updates to its distribution of the Cloud Foundry PaaS every 90 days. That’s a cadence the average internal IT organization is not prepared to keep pace with without help from an external services provider, he says.

    Also, increased usage of microservices based on containers running on Cloud Foundry is driving organizations to shift allocation of their own internal resources away from managing underlying infrastructure. By relying on managed services providers such as Rackspace to manage both the PaaS and the underlying infrastructure, Andrews says more resources can be focused on managing the DevOps pipeline.

    Pivotal opted to partner with Rackspace because Rackspace is capable to supporting instances of Cloud Foundry running on a public cloud, in a hosting center or on-premises, he says, adding that 60 percent of the Pivotal instances run on VMware vSphere platform, while the rest are distributed across multiple clouds and other on-premises environments. Pivotal is a sister company of VMware, operating under the umbrella of Dell Technologies.

    Brannon Lacey, vice president and general manager for applications and platforms at Rackspace, says his company is embracing Pivotal as part of a larger push to deliver managed services above the infrastructure level. Previously, Lacey says, Rackspace managed e-commerce and content management applications, then acquired TriCore to add a portfolio of managed ERP application services. However, the company doesn’t have any plans to add more PaaS environments to its portfolio beyond the Cloud Foundry PaaS curated by Pivotal.

    Historically, managed services have accounted for about a quarter of all IT spending. But as the number of deployment options available to IT organizations continue to expand, Lacey says Rackspace is expecting the number of companies that look beyond their internal IT organizations to manage that complexity will only increase.

    As more managed services providers become part of the DevOps pipeline, it’s clear that many companies will soon need to consider how to create processes that extend well beyond their own organizations. That may prove to be a significant challenge because of the cadence of the update process is dictated by the external entities. Of course, IT organizations can dictate the pace of the upgrades. But the further an IT organization falls behind in terms of upgrades, the more expensive the managed service tends to become. In short, there’s no such thing as a proverbial DevOps easy button.

    — Mike Vizard

  • VMware CEO Stakes Out DevOps Position

    VMware CEO Stakes Out DevOps Position

    At the Dell EMC World 2017 conference this week, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger waded into an increasingly heated DevOps debate by suggesting that most developers are too “lazy” to be really interested in IT operations.

    At a time when factions within the DevOps community are making the case for developers to be responsible for DevOps on an end-to-end basis, Gelsinger contends that most developers want to get out of being involved with IT operations as quickly as possible so they can spend more time developing applications.

    The VMware approach to DevOps is closely aligned with Pivotal, a sister company operating under the Dell Technologies umbrella that curates an instance of the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment developed by the Cloud Foundry Foundation.

    Gelsinger notes that the two primary reasons developers have shifted workloads to public clouds is perceived costs and the fact that invoking infrastructure as a service (IaaS) via an application programming interface (API) is simpler. To combat both those issues, Dell EMC has been rolling out preintegrated converged and hyperconverged infrastructure that, for certain classes of workloads, is less expensive to own over multiple years. Those systems are optimized to run either VMware or Microsoft virtualization software within a software-defined data center that exposes IT infrastructure resources via APIs. In effect, Dell EMC is applying a cloud operating model on top of IT infrastructure deployed inside the data center to close what Gelsinger describes as an “easy gap” between public clouds and internal IT operations. As those systems are more widely deployed, Dell EMC and VMware jointly contend that IT organizations will be in a better position to inject more agility into their DevOps processes.

    Many IT operations professionals have a vested interest in the outcome of those efforts because developers have been doing an end run around internal IT operations teams by deploying applications directly on to a public cloud. The challenge VMware recognizes, says Gelsinger, is that the entire DevOps space currently is chaotic. Each IT organization not only has a different view concerning to what level of DevOps integration it wants to achieve, but none of them are at the same point in making that DevOps journey. In fact, there’s a raging debate over the merits of PaaS environments versus lighter-weight container-as-a-service (CaaS) environments.

    Dell EMC, in collaboration with VMware and Pivotal, has invested heavily in a Cloud Foundry platform that it makes available as a Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) offering is increasingly automated, from an IT operations perspective. The latest version includes a rolling update capability that requires no human intervention. Pivotal claims one financial services customer has deployed 10,000 application containers on an instance of PCF that is managed by only four IT operations people. Couple that level of automation with the automation that VMware and Dell EMC are driving into the underlying IT infrastructure, and it shows that DevOps will be profoundly different than today. Less clear is who inside the IT organization will be exactly managing what.

    — Mike Vizard