Top Quotes from Cloud Foundry Summit Europe 2019

Cloud Foundry adoption doubles

The Cloud Foundry Summit Europe 2019 was held in Hague last week. The conference began with some key announcements from the foundation and the ecosystem members. For instance, IBM highlighted its work in bringing Cloud Foundry and Red Hat OpenShift together. This update was a surprise given how many saw Cloud Foundry and the Kubernetes–centric OpenShift ecosystem as competitors.

The Cloud Foundry Foundation also released the findings from their most recent user survey. The report noted how the adoption of Cloud Foundry has grown nearly twice compared to the previous years with 45% of respondents describing their use of the PaaS as broad compared to 30% in 2018 and 24% in 2017.

“Over half the Fortune 500 are shaping the future of their companies on Cloud Foundry today.” —Abby Kearns, the Cloud Foundry Foundation

Abby Kearns, Cloud Foundry Foundation Executive Director, provided some key statistics during her keynote. According to Abby, there were 51,000 commits and 5,500+ pull requests in the last 12 months. The community has also grown with over 5,000 contributors and 684 repositories. As for the conference itself, she noted that there were 711 attendees who registered for 94 keynotes, breakouts, and lightning talks. Abby also highlighted the growth of women in the community with 25% of the speakers and 17% of attendees being women.

Abby Kearns at the Cloud Foundry Summit in Hague

The Community Advisory Board (CAB) meeting for September was held live at the event. With all the activities at the summit, we gathered some of the quotes that caught our attention.

Focusing on developer experience

If there’s one thing Cloud Foundry does well, it’s about improving the developer experience.

• “For us, one of the nice things of Cloud Foundry is that we have pipelines that developers can push. They don’t have to worry about development environments.” —Andy Paine, Goverment Digital Service (UK)
• “What developers enjoy today with Cloud Foundry was unheard of 10 years ago.” —Chip Childers, the Cloud Foundry Foundation
Chip Childers
• “Build a superior path to production and operate it as a service to developers.” —James Urquhart, Pivotal
• The reason Cloud Foundry works and is productive is that it takes away the pain of being an enterprise developer. If you’ve experienced the before and the after, go find somebody who hasn’t yet experienced the after.” —Chip Childers, the Cloud Foundry Foundation
• “Less infrastructure code is what I’m chasing.” —Andy Paine, Goverment Digital Service (UK)

Improving Cloud Foundry

With Cloud Foundry steadily evolving over the years, community members shared what they expect to see in the future.

• “This old world of ticket-driven IT is changing…need to move into a world where it’s modern, progressive, API-driven capabilities.” —Craig McLuckie, VMware
• “cf push gets you far, but you have to keep pushing that line.” —Dustin Bennett, Wayfair
• “It seems like there are some really important problems out there that we aren’t using tech to improve…what’s another social network going to solve?” —Paula Kennedy, Pivotal
Abby Kearns and Craig McLuckie
• “The market is catching up to our relentless focus on the developer experience.” —Abby Kearns, the Cloud Foundry Foundation
• “What do you want from continuous delivery? Two things: speed and confidence.” —Andreas Evers, Pivotal
• “Cloud Foundry has a history of evolving the platform and users get to benefit from that.”
  —Chip Childers, the Cloud Foundry Foundation

Sharing the experience

The Cloud Foundry community has always had a focus on helping others and providing advice. So, the summit was exactly the place to sharing insights and experience.

• “The team that deploys on top of Cloud Foundry needs very little training and is able to look after the infrastructure themselves.” —Andy Paine, Goverment Digital Service (UK)
• “Building a cloud-native app isn’t hard, as long as you don’t have to worry about a state…but people need to log in, so you already have to worry about a session state.” —Onno Brouwer, Rijkswaterstaat
• “Anything you can put into environment variables, you don’t have to put into custom code and have logic forks.” —Dustin Bennett, Wayfair
• “Real transformation is not about adopting a shiny technology…but about mastering these new rapids.” —Abby Kearns, the Cloud Foundry Foundation
• “The fact that you can push anything, and it just works, means that sometimes you do things that are less than optimal.” —Andy Paine, Goverment Digital Service (UK)
Onno Brouwer
• “We need to think about three things with Pivotal now that it is part of VMware: a common substrate (Kubernetes), the ability to manage it, and a build overlay. The cf push experience is important, making the experience better for developers.” —Craig McLuckie, VMware

Pushing for equality

With the Foundation’s community-centric approach, diversity and inclusion was a big talking point. As always, the diversity luncheon was a big hit.

• “Folks in position of power can’t wait for feedback about how they give gendered feedback. Do some self-work.” —Katrina Bakas, Pivotal
• “I have to be 150% ready for a meeting, because I know I’ll be perceived a certain way because of how I look.” —Nikita Rathi, Pivotal
• “We know the power of technology and have seen how it can change lives. And yet, we’re not using that power to solve the hard problems we know exist.” —Paula Kennedy, Pivotal
• “Thank you to every developer in this room. Your engagement and contributions have made Cloud Foundry what it is today.” —Abby Kearns, the Cloud Foundry Foundation
• “We need to embrace change as a community. It’s hard, but it’s important.” —Abby Kearns, the Cloud Foundry Foundation

Summit attendees at the Altoros hand-on labs

Expanding the ecosystem

In the last few years, Kubernetes has made its way into every Cloud Foundry conversation. As previously mentioned, OpenShift is also entering the Cloud Foundry ecosystem as IBM progresses on integrating the two together. However, it should be noted that this development will make use of IBM’s Cloud Foundry for now.

• “We bring a better developer experience to Kubernetes.” —Abby Kearns, the Cloud Foundry Foundation
• “The cf push experience on top of Kubernetes is what the industry needs. Bringing these two communities together will benefit everyone.” —Craig McLuckie, VMware
• “We can bring Cloud Foundry and OpenShift together with the technology this community has been building.” —Simon Moser, IBM
• “There is no industry consensus around tooling on Kubernetes.” —Chip Childers, the Cloud Foundry Foundation
• “If I ever get direct access to Kubernetes, that’s a failure. If you had told me in college that I’d be writing configuration, instead of writing code for a business problem, I would have looked for a different job.” —Darren Forsythe, Liberty
• “One of the most painful things in IT is patch management. Now, you introduce something like containers, and platforms that orchestrate containers allow you to solve this problem and create more resilient and secure systems.” —Cornelia Davis, Pivotal

Cornelia Davis, Jeff Hobbs, Bernd Krannich, and Simon Moser

As the conference ended, we can look forward to the developments next year. With Kubernetes dominating much of the discussion around Cloud Foundry these days, it will be interesting to see how it will all work out given the continuous growth of Eirini.