The key to truly being successful with Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) is to have a dedicated team equipped with modern practices and methodologies running your cloud platform. Join Caleb and Parker from Pivotal Cloud Foundry’s Solutions team, as they discuss what a healthy platform capability looks like, and share practical advice on how to ensure your platform team is ready to unlock the full value of PCF. This webinar is for all people who have purchased PCF and those that are considering doing so. In this webinar you will understand: ● What we mean by 'treat your platform as a product' ● The need for a dedicated platform team ● Why you need to adopt a culture of continuous improvement ● How to garner executive support in order to challenge convention Presenters: Caleb Washburn, Director, Solutions Architect & Parker Fleming, Director, Solutions Architect, Pivotal

1. © Copyright 2018 Pivotal Software, Inc. All rights Reserved. Version 1.0
Approaches, Considerations, and Stories of Success
Habits of Highly Effective
Platform Teams:
UNLOCKING THE VALUE OF PCF

2. What does the PCF Solutions Team do?
We build balanced platform teams
for our customers
● Focus on enablement
● Pairing
● Teaching platform operations using:
○ Site Reliability Engineering
○ XP
○ User Centered Design
Service Offerings
Platform Dojo
Platform Health Check

3. Webinar Agenda
1. What “value” are we trying to unlock?
2. What do successful platform teams have in common?
3. How to create a culture of continuous Improvement
4. Platform operations in practice
5. Common challenges
6. Q&A

4. What is the Value of PCF?
And how does the Platform Team Unlock it?
Speed
Security
Scalability
Savings
Stability
Facilitate Speed to Market for Application Innovation
Continuous patching to address CVEs within days
Enable self-service provisioning of capacity
High developer:operator ratio
Application of SRE practices (SLI/SLOs, Error budgets, etc.)
Area Example

5. What do Successful Platform Teams Have in Common?
Trust in PCF
Application Teams:
“The platform is reliable and
behaves as expected across
all environments.”
The Business:
“The platform is stable and
secure and allows our LOBs
to innovate quickly.”
TRUST: The most successful platform teams operate in a high trust environment.
Trust in DevelopersTrust in the Platform Team
Application Teams:
“The Platform Team focuses
on our needs and they partner
with us to form solutions.”
The Business:
“Platform operations are
low-risk and we allows the
team to manage their error
budget autonomously.”
Platform Team:
“App Teams are responsible
and knowledgeable tenants
and adhere to the 12 factors.”
The Business:
“Developers have well tested
code and we are comfortable
with them releasing code to
production whenever it’s
ready.”

6. BUILDING TRUST IS HARD
(And It Won’t Happen Overnight)
BUT IT IS WORTH THE EFFORT!
What do Successful Platform Teams Have in Common?

7. How to Create a Culture of Continuous Improvement
Hypothesis Driven Backlog
● Your backlog should be
driven by measurable
hypotheses
● Don’t commit to date-driven
deliverables
● Ask “Why?”
Measure What MattersFeedback Loops
Start Small and Don’t Try to Boil The Ocean
● Short feedback loops
● Validate your hypotheses
● Talk to your users directly
● What do they love/hate?
● Is the Platform meeting their
needs today? What will they
need tomorrow?
● Know your reliability targets
and monitor the things to
help you know if you’re
meeting your SLOs
● Understand your users
needs and track the things
that matter to them

8. (Balanced Platform Team)
Platform Operations in Practice
Site Reliability Engineering
“SRE is what you get when you
treat operations as if it’s a
software problem”1
and aims at
developing software systems to
solve complex problems.
1
“What is SRE?”: https://landing.google.com/sre/
Platform as a Product
Design the product (your
platform) around the needs of
your customers, rather than
seeking to change the user's
behaviors around how a product
(Pivotal Cloud Foundry) works.
Engineering Product Management

9. Platform Operations in Practice
Site Reliability Engineering
● Your platform team should be
able to code
● Automate away the toil
● Establish SLI/SLOs
● Use (all of) your error budget to
innovate & iterate on your
platform
Platform as a Product
● Establish a brand for your
platform product
● The product is the entire
platform ecosystem (not just
PCF)
● Talk directly to your customers
(app developers & LOBs)
frequently to validate you are
building the right thing

10. Common Challenges
1. Lack of executive sponsorship to support change
2. Business is stuck in status quo (“Stockholm Syndrome”)
3. Team not dedicated to the platform
4. No full-time product manager (traditional project management)
5. Poor cross-org collaboration (Heavily silo’d)
6. Failure leads to scapegoating (vs. learning opportunity)
7. Micromanagement (no empowerment)
8. Application Teams don’t understand how to architect “cloud native apps”

11. Any Questions?
THANK YOU!

12. Transforming How The World Builds and Runs Software
© Copyright 2017 Pivotal Software, Inc. All rights Reserved.