Halloween is past and the leaves have turned, which means that SpringOne Platform 2017, taking place December 4th to 7th in San Francisco, is right around the corner. This year’s conference is the biggest yet, with 10 tracks to pick from, over 120 individual sessions, and over 200 speakers, and that’s not even counting fun evening activities.
With so much happening, it’s impossible to pick the ten best sessions. So instead, I’ve highlighted one session from each of the ten tracks. Consider these my personal Top Ten Can’t Miss Sessions at SpringOne Platform 2017, not necessarily “the best.” The sessions you find most valuable will likely depend on your job role and technology interests. But consider these ten sessions when putting together your own schedule for the developer-led conference of the year..
Session: Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Google Machine Learning, and Spring
Track: Cloud-Native Platform
There’s probably no hotter topic these days than artificial intelligence (AI). And nobody does AI better than Google. In this joint session with Pivotal’s Brian Jimerson and Google’s Brian Gregory, you’ll learn how to infuse your Spring applications running on Pivotal Cloud Foundry with AI via Google Cloud's Machine Learning API. If you’re interested in developing smart, data-driven applications, this session is a must.
Session: Agile: The Bad Parts
Track: Agile, PM, Methodology
Everyone’s always talking about how great things are. Well, here’s a refreshing take on how bad agile can be. No, these aren’t a bunch of Debbie Downers. In fact, presenters Matt Parker, Martina Hodges-Schell, and Joanna Beltowska think agile is crucial to modern software development. Which is why they will explain why agile sometimes fails in the enterprise and what to do to fix it.
Session: Test Driven Development with Spring Boot – Testing the Harder Stuff
Track: Core Spring
Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a fundamental tenet of modern software development. And TDD can be fairly straight-forward. But developing light-weight unit tests for more complex features and capabilities, like caching, can be challenging. In this session, Pivotal’s Sannidhi Jalukar and Madhura Bhave will show you how to simplify TDD with help from the latest Spring Boot annotations and utilities. They’ll illustrate with some challenging use cases, including doing TDD for database queries, caching, reactive components, and message brokers.
Session: Cloud-Native Data: What is it? Will it Solve the Data-DevOps Divide?
Track: Data, Databases
Every conference needs a good panel discussion. This session, led by Pivotal’s Dormain Drewitz, delves into the tricky topic of cloud-native data. What makes it a tricky topic? Well, check out the 12 Factor App Manifesto. Do you see anything about managing state or architecting the data layer? Nope. Luckily, Dormain and panelists—Honeycomb’s Charity Majors, Southwest Airline’s Brian Dunlap, Redmonk’s Stephen O’Grady and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency’s Tim Richardson—have plenty to say on the topic.
Session: Not Actually a DevOps Talk, or, Beyond “Survival is Not Mandatory”
Track: DevOps, CI, CD
If you’re coming to SpringOne Platform, you can’t miss Michael Cote, or just Cote as he’s known. In this session, Cote takes on the the topic of DevOps, but not just what it means. He’ll share examples of large enterprises and their attempts to implement DevOps with varying degrees of success. Luckily, you can learn just as much from DevOps success as you can from DevOps failure, as you’ll find out when you attend this session. You’ll get advice for high level DevOps planning and learn specific tactics for improving how you manage custom software in production.
Session: Caching for Microservices – Introduction to Pivotal Cloud Cache
Track: Geode
High-performance isn’t a nice-to-have when it comes to customer-facing web and mobile applications. Users expect near instant response times and won’t hang around long if they don’t get it. That’s where Pivotal Cloud Cache (PCC) comes in. PCC is a caching solution inside Pivotal Cloud Foundry that makes it easy to store and quickly serve up data to your microservices applications. In this session, Pivotal’s Pulkit Chandra will introduce you to PCC and how to use it to support extremely low latency applications. Add this session to your schedule.
Session: Refactoring to a System of Systems
Track: Microservices, Serverless
Refactoring monolithic applications into microservices has many benefits. But doing so isn’t simply a matter of replicating existing design patterns across a series of new services. In this session, Pivotal’s Oliver Gierke explains why replicating existing design patterns leads to more, not less, complexity and offers a strategy for designing and implementing microservices that deliver all the benefits you’d expect, like the ability to scale services independently of each other.
Session: Case Study of Batch Processing With Spring Cloud Data Flow Server in Cloud Foundry
Track: Reactive, Event-Driven
CoreLogic is in the process of refactoring one of its most important applications, called CoreLogic RiskMeter, as a cloud-native 12 factor application. As part of the process, the CoreLogic team decided to recreate the old application’s batch processing features using Spring Cloud Data Flow Server on Pivotal Cloud Foundry. In this session, CoreLogic’s Bruce Thelen will walk you through how he and the team accomplished this and share lessons learned, such as how best to implement blue/green deployment of Spring Tasks.
Session: Cloud-Native Journey in Synchrony Financial
Track: Transformation, Case Studies
I love case studies. There’s really no better way to learn about modern software in the real world than from those that are doing it. This includes Synchrony Financial. The financial services company is in the midst of its own digital transformation journey as it adapts to the realities of banking in the 21st century. In this session, Synchrony’s Michael Barber shares the company’s transformation story, from vision to reality.
Session: What’s New in Spring Boot 2.0
Track: Web, JavaScript
As RedMonk recently pointed out, Spring Boot is exploding in popularity and is on track to become the most popular Java framework in the not too distant future. Why? Because the Spring Boot community continues to innovate, as you’ll learn in this session. Pivotal’s Madhura Bhave and Phillip Webb dive head-first into Spring Boot 2.0, covering all the new features designed to make developing Spring applications even easier and faster. If you use Spring Boot, you can’t miss this session. Add this session to your schedule.
Have your own list of must-see sessions? Share your list on Twitter using the hashtag #s1p and we’ll see you in San Francisco! Register for SpringOne Platform 2017 here.
