Cloud Native Runtime Platform

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. We’re going to spend time looking at the capabilities of Pivotal Cloud Foundry’s Elastic Runtime. 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. The focus of this session is the runtime platform, but don’t forget there is a synergy between the different tools and of course the culture. The Pivotal Runtime Platform is built on the Cloud Foundry Elastic Runtime. The elastic runtime has been leveraging containers since Cloud Foundry was still an open source project at VMware. The platform also provides self service work flows with policy enforced role based access to resources and operational benefits like monitoring, metrics and healing.
6. Here is the goal, the motivation, the why, simply stated: To quicken the pace of delivering software reliably and securely at scale We also want to increase operational efficiency to drive down the cost of deployment and operations. Wouldn’t it be nice?
7. Most developers interaction with the runtime will be pushing code into the platform. That just works. The platform enforces policy about permission and role based access to resources to make doing the right thing the easy thing. All developers should need to worry about is solving problems that create value for the organization. The platform won’t solve all the hard problems of delivering software, but it will solve many of the problems that are not unique to you. Do work that matters to you using a platform to drive down the time and human cost of deploying applications.
8. At the core of the runtime is a dynamic container scheduler that distributes applications across a cluster. When there is more work, the work gets balanced across the remaining of the capacity. The platform also monitors the applications, and if any of them crash, they get restarted. The runtime platform also provides a service broker mechanism to connect applications to backing services, like databases and message queues, or utilize higher level services like continuous integration or source control. Service brokers can even be connected to existing systems of record, all credentials handled transparently by the platform so no one needs to know the password to the database.
9. Have you heard the buzz about microservices? Microservices is the architecture adopted by organizations that need to move quickly at scale. A lot of people are talking about all the problems they solve, and thoughtful people are pointing out the problems they cause. If the fixed cost to deploy and operate a service is high, microservices are an expensive nightmare. According to Martin Fowler, being successful with microservices has 4 baseline requirements: Rapid Provisioning Basic Monitoring Rapid Deployment And a DevOps Culture Pivotal Cloud Foundry can give you everything but change your culture.
10. Cloud Native platforms defines a contract with their applications. The most familiar contract is 12 factor applications, but there can be others. The constraints of the contract are what allow the platform to keep promises. The other side of a 12 factor app has to be a platform which provides 12 factor opps. This is in stark contrast to the ad hoc automation of the past, which can become it’s own burden. By focusing on defining a collection of patterns with predictable scaling and failure characteristics, the platform does narrow choices but offers an infinite opportunity for flexible and varied expression with strong guarantees about how your applications can scale and recover from failure.
11. You can have Pivotal Cloud Foundry as software, but we also run the same code as a service. Our core business is software. Pivotal hasn’t imagined what software deployment might be like, we deploy software for our enterprise and startup customers every day. We know this works because we use it.
12. Thank you for your time today, we welcome you to check out all the Pivotal presentations and encourage you to ask one of our technology 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.