I did a couple consulting stints at Pivotal, working on the CF team. They have a very particular methodology that evolved from the earliest days of agile (Rob Mee was a friend of Kent Beck back when XP was being worked out). I walked in there as a very experienced engineer and a healthy amount of skepticism... and it turned out to be a fantastic learning experience. I've since taken the Pivotal process (yeah, even the weird stuff like pair programming) and used it effectively to manage subsequent companies.
I don't love everything about Pivotal (neither Ruby nor Go make my favorite-languages list) but then, not everyone at Pivotal does either. But overall they do agile right, and they have a lot to show for it. You can mock 9:06 but also note that people go home at 6pm and have lives. The schedule has its upsides.
The place sounds more like a cult than a company.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1574135/000104746918...
to paraphrase:
Besides consulting and software development (Labs), their main product is PCF (Pivotal Cloud Foundry). Basically it helps combine the best bits of cloud centric, automated, containerized tools - without locking you in and letting you be portable across AWS, Google, Azure or private clouds.
The big thing here is that there is a massive opportunity of large companies still managing large monolithic apps with slow, expensive horribly inefficient infrastructure and deployment practices. Pivotal helps (especially bigCo.'s) rebuild their whole app infrastructure as well as transform their culture of software development. The biggest thing, according to their case studies, is that both speed of development as well as the ratio of 'ops' headcount to 'developer' headcount can be significantly improved.
Pretty smart way to do it - and I can see how it would be really aggravating from a power-user/10x engineer perspective.
You can run whatever you like, even Windows stuff. You only need to have (a) build pack(s) (aka runtime layer) and a stemcell (base operating system).
CF is like Heroku on steroids or like Lamda+API Gateway+Services for more complex applications.
And Pivotal provides one product of Cloud Foundry ( Pivotal Cloud Foundry), that can be deployed to various Cloud Providers (such as AWS, Azure or OpenStack). There are other vendors, like IBM (Bluemix).
I guess, you mixed it up with the Spring ecosystem, which surely a big driver in the adoption of Cloud Foundry. Pivotal is the core maintainer of the ecosystem.
And no, you don't need to be a big enterprise to run a CF.
I also suspect that providers will not keep feature-competitive with one another. It seems like every month, AWS is releasing new tools, and there's no way that other providers are maintaining this pace. My suspicion is each provider will specialize in non-overlapping domains. So unless your company will always be running a lowest-common-denominator site, you'll eventually encounter a vendor lock-in feature.
They are kind-of the OG multi-cloud vendor.
I also had to do work with Pivotal HD, which was their custom Hadoop distribution. Not sure the status of that these days, they may have nixed it - it's been a while since I worked on that platform.
In a short matter of years, they took a consulting services company, adopted some poorly designed abandonware from VMWare, and rebuilt it into a product that now serves some of the biggest companies in the world. Pretty much everything has been rewritten and almost all of it is available in github.
CloudFoundry is not sexy software. It's basically Heroku that big stodgy companies can run in-house. Startups will never use it; they can use actual-Heroku. The crazy thing is that Pivotal supports these huge enterprise software installations inside other people's data centers, often without direct access. It's really, really hard work.
I really hope this makes a bunch of my friends rich - they deserve it.
What happened to it? Why did VMWare abandon it? As far as I remember it was written in Ruby / Event Machine. As I understand it, Heroku also has large parts in Ruby, so that isn't a problem by itself.
How did Pivotal get involved? Were they hired by VMWare, and then they took it over?
Why / how did they rewrite it?
I had some ex co-workers who consulted for Pivotal around 2005-2006, and I have seen their name pop up from time to time. Pivotal tracker seems somewhat popular, and then I remember their name popping up again around Cloud Foundry.
It's nice to see that they turned it into something. It does seem like a nice success story for "open source cloud". This was around the same time that OpenStack was getting going too, but it seems like the success of OpenStack has been more mixed.
* EMC bought VMWare
* EMC bought Pivotal
* EMC moved all the enterprisey software to Pivotal (including CF & Spring)
* Dell bought EMC
* Dell/EMC spun off Pivotal
When I say "pretty much everything has been rewritten" I mean it has evolved like that; they didn't sit down to rewrite CloudFoundry (Pivotal does not do rewrites as a cultural axiom). I mean that piecemeal pretty much every bit of code has been altered in significant ways. A lot of the Ruby has been swapped out for Go for performance and maintainability reasons. It was pretty funny to watch a large body of die-hard Rubyists get excited about static types (come to the light!).
As a consultant I was really a fringe player; I'm sure there are people reading this who are/were much more involved and could tell the story better.
The thing I found most interesting is that this project should have failed. A HUGE incredibly complicated body of enterprise software with near-100% team turnover? I would have bet against it ever working. But all that pair programming and rotation and writing stories and backfilling tests etc just eventually ground the problem down. It was expensive as hell and it took years but it looks like a success story now. I don't know of any other big takeover project like this that worked. It's a huge credit to the people working on it, and yes - to the "Pivotal process" that seems to irk so many people in this thread.
Pivotal Labs got bought by EMC in 2012, who also owned VMWare. A year or so later EMC spun out Pivotal Labs combined with VMWare and some other companies(Green Plum) in a new company under the Pivotal name.
Cloud Foundry is VERY mature nowadays, is completely opensource and is part of the Linux Foundation. You can view it as Linux, which is the vanilla opensource version and which has different distros (CentOS, Ubuntu, ...)
Cloud Foundry is the vanilla opensource version, and there are many (commercial) distros available, like Pivotal Cloud Foundry, IBM Bluemix, SAP Cloud Platform, etc...
[1] https://bosh.io/
I'm late to the game here; was it GSX Server a.k.a. VMware Server?[1]
Almost every company I've been at has used abhorrent alternatives like Asana, Jira, etc. and they've been consistently awful experiences.
The one tool that I've been loving for the past year is http://clubhouse.io. Such a well-designed product and extremely flexible (I think it could fit most teams' requirements around Agile/Kanban/etc.)
It was the absolute __worst__ year of my life. I had to pair with people non-stop even when __fixing bugs__. There were zounds of stupid rules which did not make sense whatsoever.
Perfect example of forcing a methodology on a company where it will never work.
I really like Pivotal products though. RabbitMQ is superb, and although Spring Boot is really slow and has its problems I use it on projects where performance is not important.
But even actual businesses can get a nice boost by filing along with a successful related IPO.
This is a really cool risk factor that I've never seen before in an S-1, exciting that more big public companies are willing to accept the risk reward that comes with contributing to open source:
If open-source software programmers, many of whom we do not employ, or our own internal programmers do not continue to use, contribute to and enhance the open-source technologies that we rely on, the market appeal of our offering may be reduced, which could harm our reputation, diminish our brand and result in decreased revenue. We also cannot predict whether further developments and enhancements to these open-source technologies will be available from reliable alternative sources. If the open-source technologies that we rely on become unavailable, we may need to invest in researching and developing alternative technologies.
"If open source software programmers, most of whom we do not employ, do not continue to develop and enhance open source technologies, we may be unable to develop new technologies, adequately enhance our existing technologies or meet customer requirements for innovation, quality and price.
We rely to a significant degree on a number of largely informal communities of independent open source software programmers to develop and enhance our enterprise technologies. For example, Linus Torvalds, a prominent open source software developer, and a relatively small group of software engineers, many of whom are not employed by us, are primarily responsible for the development and evolution of the Linux kernel, which is the heart of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. If these groups of programmers fail to adequately further develop and enhance open source technologies, we would have to rely on other parties to develop and enhance our offerings or we would need to develop and enhance our offerings with our own resources. We cannot predict whether further developments and enhancements to these technologies would be available from reliable alternative sources. In either event, our development expenses could be increased and our technology release and upgrade schedules could be delayed. Moreover, if third-party software programmers fail to adequately further develop and enhance open source technologies, the development and adoption of these technologies could be stifled and our offerings could become less competitive. Delays in developing, completing or delivering new or enhanced offerings could result in delayed or reduced revenue for those offerings and could also adversely affect customer acceptance of those offerings."
That said, I just can't understand why you'd ever pick PCF over Kubernetes. Sure, I get one deploys application code, and the other deploys containers. But after using the buildpack system for a while, I really think containers are the better solution (assuming you have the CI/CD to keep your custom containers up-to-date with new base images).
So it'll be interesting to see what Pivotal does there, and how they position PCF, especially now that they have their own branded version of Kubernetes[1].
[1]. https://content.pivotal.io/announcements/introducing-pivotal...
And having someone provide a more enterprisey K8S is helpful. The version churn right now is pretty bad, and not something F500 companies want to deal with.
The thing that bothered me with the model was it disincentives modern microservice architectures. One big monolith cost less than lots of smaller components.
It may have changed since I last saw the details.
Not only are many of his claims dubious, unwarranted, or hyperbolic, but there are a few gems like this:
> Remember when the CEO globally emailed a picture of his ugly newborn and drugged up post-birth wife to the entire company because he thinks we all submit to his cult of personality?
It's not uncommon for that to happen. People share pictures of their new kids to their departments and whole companies all the time. Usually it's because new kids are a joyful experience, for, y'know, humans in general. CEOs do it too--for cynical reasons or not--and raging against that, to say nothing of the criticism of the "drugged-up" mother (epidural anesthesia is incredibly helpful and medically essential in tons of births), displays a somewhat shocking failure to grasp typical corporate-people behavior in America at best, and an axe-to-grind willingness to engage in ad-hominem slander of people's families at worst.
Even if any of his claims have merit, I have a ton of trouble believing anything from someone who talks like that.
Full disclosure: I am currently employed by another member of the Cloud Foundry Foundation.
I think the thing is that in consulting, the equation is "margin = billable rate - salary". The higher the salary, the less profitable you are. Feels to me like Pivotal mostly hires mid-level people to hit the sweet spot of experience/skill/salary.
It's a bummer because I went on to work with a company that engaged Pivotal Labs and I loved working with the Pivots.
Spring Cloud includes a lot of the Netflix OSS stuff though like Zuul and Archaius.
https://tinysubversions.com/spooler/?url=https://twitter.com...
PCF is very solid. The only issues we ran into were some confusing configuration settings and your basic federal government bureaucracy nonsense. Once we got all the IaaS boxes ticked, it installed without issue and worked beautifully.
I'd never want to install or maintain open-source Cloud Foundry as it's a nightmare of complexity; however, PCF is a different animal because of its streamlined installer. I definitely recommend giving it a go if you're looking for on-premises PaaS and you've got the IaaS layer to support it. You can also demo PCF within a single VirtualBox VM.
CF even can't even survive unplanned reboot of DC, after such incidents you literally will get parted cluster and no one know what to do.
Thank you Pivotal for such experience.
We’re back to this model of “innovation” I guess.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1574135/000104746918...