Exclusive first look at Pivotal One, a comprehensive, multi-cloud Enterprise PaaS that runs on top of Pivotal CF, the leading enterprise distribution of the Cloud Foundry platform. James Watters, Head of Product and James Bayer, Director of Product Management, share learnings from enterprises who are overcoming the challenges of transforming into software-driven organizations by using Pivotal One, an integrated platform of application and data services that run on Pivotal CF.
http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/14/as-software-eats-the-world-non-tech-corporations-are-eating-startups/Either become a software driven enterprise and/or buy a startup with agile teams:Over the past year or two, non-tech corporations have begun to actually open their wallets to arm themselves with talent and technology that can help them enter the digital and data-focused world we now live and work in. It’s no longer Google, Facebook and Yahoo that are competing to acquire the best and the brightest startups in Silicon Valley. There are plenty of corporations in retail, health, agriculture, financial services and other industries that are sending their corp-dev talent to scout out possible acquisitions in the Bay Area and beyond.Let’s take a look at some of the examples. Earlier this year, Monsanto, a multinational chemical, and agricultural biotechnology corporation, bought big data weather tech company Climate Corporation for $1.1 billion. Insurer UnitedHealth Group bought health data analytics company Humedica for hundreds of millions of dollars. A few weeks ago, fitness clothing retailer Under Armourbought fitness tracking app developer MapMyFitness for $150 million. Office supply retailer Staples bought e-commerce personalization company Runa. Payments processing giant First Data has acquired mobile loyalty startup Perka and mobile payments startup Clover in the past year. Retail giant Target has picked up a number of e-commerce companies. Ford Motors bought in-car music app startup Livio. The list goes on.Their main motivation is realizing that software is eating the world.Exitround, the website that launched earlier this year and lets startups anonymously seek acquirers, has been seeing a strong uptick in non-tech, corporate acquirers joining the marketplace to find potential talent and startups.“Their main motivation is realizing that software is eating the world, and they have to add software talent and technologies to their products,” explained Exitround founder Jacob Mullins. On the marketplace, Mullins says that 10 percent of buyers are Fortune 500 companies and 20 percent of acquirers are publicly traded, with a good percentage of the group being non-tech companies
Source 1:The software edge, How effective software development and delivery drives competitive advantage, IBM Institute for Business ValueThe importance of SW development: 54% ofcos believe it’s criticalBut only 25% leverage it todayThose who leverage it (software development) effectively outperform those who don’tIn fact, almost 70 percent of the companies currently leveraging software development for competitive advantage outperform their peers from a profitability standpoint. Source 2: Platform: The Cloud Foundry Conference - Jonathan Murray http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIg7TO0CaKASource 3: Financial Times – Banks need to take on Amazon and Google or die – Francisco Gonzalez, Chief Executive BBA – BBVA is the second largest bank in Spain, after Santander. Since 2006 the bank has focused on overseas expansion, and now operates in 40 countries. €22 billion revenue in 2012.Some bankers and analysts think that Google, Facebook, Amazon or the like will not fully enter a highly regulated, low-margin business such as banking. I disagree. What is more, I think banks that are not prepared for such new competitors face certain death.Technology has already transformed many industries. Next in line is banking. In two or three years, only 5 per cent of consumer interaction will be through branches. The rules have changed and a new league of competitors is emerging.
Traditional application deployment process on LHS (actual example from Rakuten) – developer asks infrastructure team to request servers, make a VM, install middleware, configure the load balancers and so on. Developers are out of the deployment workflow in the company - application deployment is stalled waiting on IT Operations to perform 8+ manual steps. That’s just for deploying a single application to an environment.This deployment complexity is amplified each time the application is moved from one environment to another as part of the traditional application lifecycle (see RHS diagram and below quote from Intel)Our traditional application deployment, or path to production, process has several less-than-ideal characteristics. For example, the process to deploy a new custom application consists of multiple manual steps and can take as much as 140 days.Also, developers must have a highly technical understanding of the underlying infrastructure, such as virtual machine provisioning and configuration, OS and middleware, and storage mechanisms. Agility is hampered by a lack of standard business processes, templates, and on-demand scaling capabilities. We believe PaaS will empower developers to be in control from development to deployment—exponentially reducing time to production, optimizing the use of resources, and encouraging the development of cloud-aware applications.
RHS diagram notes from IntelLIMITED AGILITYToday, the process to build and host a custom application is lengthy and complex, often taking several months after an application is initially developed to fully deploy it into production. Each application follows its own path to production process, which includes source code development, test, and production phases. Each phase of the path to production requires a dedicated environment to be provisioned, compounding the complexity of application setup and deployment. The typical application lifecycle includes 75 individual steps, only 9 percent of which are fully automated. The entire process can take 130 to 140 days for new custom applications, and 30 to 40 days for version updates. Other milestones in the application lifecycle, such as maintenance, new releases, and end-of-life, are also characterized by multiple steps and minimal automation, as illustrated RHS diagram. By the time the application is landed, it could be out of date or no longer relevant, resulting in lost revenue opportunities.
Old world:Developer asks infrastructure team to request servers, make a VM, install middleware, configure the load balancers and so on - application deployment is stalled waiting onIT Operations to manually configure complex middleware. New World PCF:Simplified to 3 easy verbsResult is App Deployment is reduced from Days/Hours to minutes and seconds with Pivotal CF, with a radical increase in application deployment speed and business agility due to the ability to rapidly deploy, receive feedback and iterate.
Adeveloper can push an application and have an “it just works™” experience. The general recommendation is that developers should not configure the environment that an application uses when running in Cloud Foundry.An application developer shouldn’t have to mess about with details like memory settings or configuring the container to work with a bound service.Pivotal CF Runtime and buildpacks infer these and other details automatically, which saves developers time and effort. We’ve put a lot of effort into making the buildpack “just work”.One of the features we’re most proud of is the work the Java buildpack does to intelligently sizethe different memory regions of the JRE
Cloud Foundry PaaSAn application runs in a DEA, which is a droplet execution agent. The Cloud Controller orchestrates the routing and lifecycle of all DEAs in the pool. Routers manage application traffic. Health Manager reports mismatched application states to the CC. A servicebroker provides an interface for services (native or external). A messaging bus manages all system communication. Apps are accessed directly through the router while web and CLI clients (e.g., vmc, STS) access Cloud Controller via RESTful services.
Rakuten traditional process on lhs – developer asks infrastructure team to request servers, make a VM, install middleware, configure the load balancers and so on. Developers are out of the deployment workflow in the company. After they introduced rPaaS with Cloud Foundry, the developer just says “push his application(s)” to deploy their applications. Some of the developers integrated push with Jenkins so everything in the deployment process is automated.As a result, from actual users they saved on infrastructure operation costs/reduced by 90%. Benefits not only for application developers but for infrastructure engineers to free up time to develop new things for infrastructure.