Cloud Native Empowered Culture

Editor's Notes

1. Thanks for visiting Pivotal at VMWorld. My name is Julia and today I want to tell you about the Pivotal mission…. From the technology, to the people, to the way people interact with technology, Pivotal is transforming how the world builds software. In this session we’ll be sharing some ideas about the processes and cultures that are demonstrably creating the best software. But first a word about how we got to this point.
2. We are entering into a fundamentally new era of business, where people have to build new experiences and new capabilities that are driven by software in order to compete in the market. Competing in this service oriented world means moving fast with consistency and reliability. Speed has to be balanced with operational excellence. This is the cloud native advantage.
3. In the not so distant past, software and systems were separate. Software was created by developers. Systems were built and maintained by system administrators. Many organizations adopted heavy handed change management processes to slow the rate of change and reduce the number of incidents, often with large infrequent changes resulting in brittle systems that tend to fail catastrophically. The relationship between developers and system administrators are often also brittle and prone to catastrophic failure. The cloud native approach focuses more on minimizing the impact of incidents by releasing small batches into architectures designed to be operated with partial failure and recovered quickly. Cloud, Devops, Microservices, Continuous Delivery; these are all aspects of the same phenomena. The words that describe high performing teams delivering faster, but also delivering consistently and reliably at scale. That’s what cloud native means.
4. Pivotal breaks down cloud native technology into 3 layers, which is all supported, reinforced and optimized by cloud native culture. At the bottom, we have API driven cloud native infrastructure automation. This abstracts the provisioning and configuration of computing, networking and storage resources. Then we have a cloud native container scheduling runtime responsible for building, running and operating applications. The top layer consists of frameworks that enable the rapid development of cloud native applications with reusable components and patterns.
5. Culture and process are as much a cloud native competitive advantage as any of the technology. The tools are important, but without the culture to use them, the tools can never be as effective. A lot of organizations try to copy the cloud technology, but how many organizations are as thoughtful about architecting their process and culture as they are their new application architecture? Software is inherently creative. The best software organizations tap into the intrinsic human motivation to create. If you don’t believe you have intelligent and motivated people you can trust to collaborate, what could possibly make you believe they can create create software?
6. Pivotal believes principles are the most important. If one understands the principles of delivering great software, you can create the practices and tools. If one does not understand, the best tools in the world may not be able to help that much. When in doubt, return to the principles.
7. Sometimes when people see gourmet food and ping pong tables, they only see the most superficial aspects. They wonder out loud if people won’t abuse the opportunity. If people can’t be trusted to be responsible with food and ping pong, what makes you think they can be trusted with delivering the future of a company. Software isn’t digging ditches. You can put in more time, but the data suggests productivity actually goes down, especially long term.
8. Checklists can be great when they help people remember to do the right things, but they often have the opposite effect then they act like gates that slow down the action. The dominant cloud companies were NOT built with the heavyweight change control processes that grind change to a halt in some enterprises. By definition you can’t go fast, if you are required to go slow. But that doesn’t mean that cloud native is all about chaos.
9. Leveraging policy aware automation, cloud native organizations provide their people a lot of autonomy. The system enforces the policy. Inside of the policy, do whatever works best, as fast as you can. The culture reinforces the automation, and the automation reinforces the culture. This is the cloud native transformation, using software to increase human performance to create software.
10. Conway’s Law suggests organizations will build systems that mirror the communication patterns of the organization. Cloud Natives use turn this idea inside out and design the org structure to map out the architecture. This might be the biggest benefit of microservice architectures, where culture and process mirror the technical outcome.
11. Many organizations set up incentives, monetary or otherwise, that put people in diametric opposition to each other’s goals. If this happens at a leadership level, you can be certain there will be a rift between those two groups from the top to the bottom. Many classic processes and incentives put developers and operations in direct opposition, as developers were incented to change things and the operators were incented to provide stability. Aligning incentives on positive outcomes across the organization resolves much of this conflict by not having any in the first place.
12. Adopting technology like Pivotal Cloud Foundry which can have such a broad and profound impact across every aspect of an organization makes addressing cultural aspects of transformation a critical success factor. What will happen in your organization if developers can deploy to production at will? Are you ready for that? What do you need to get ready for that? Pivotal would love to figure that out together.
13. Thank you for your time today, we welcome you to check out all the Pivotal presentations and encourage you to ask one of our experts any questions you might have. We would love to spend time telling you more about how Pivotal’s Cloud Native Platform is transforming how the world builds software.