Need to Improve Your Build Pipelines? Writing Too Much YAML? Then Head to Cloud Foundry Summit Europe. Here’s Our Show Preview.

If you want to get your code from laptop to production, there’s nothing better than Cloud Foundry. That’s why many of the world’s largest companies trust their most important apps to the platform. Next week, the CF community converges on Basel to discuss the state of modern enterprise development.

A central topic at the conference: how Cloud Foundry continues to make life easier for developers. How is the platform evolving and maturing to do more work for you? What business outcomes are enterprises getting from Cloud Foundry? And, the question that keeps us up at night: how I can stop writing so much YAML?

The keynotes – helpfully detailed on the full schedule – promise to entertain and enlighten. There’s a fantastic set of breakouts as well. We came up with a list of talks you should attend…especially if boosting developer productivity is a priority. Haven’t signed up yet? Register now!

Here’s a look at Day 1.

Day 1

Wednesday, October 10 • 11:35 – 12:05

Running Smart Apps on the Cloud Foundry Platform

Amith Nambiar, Pivotal

In the early days of Cloud Foundry, enterprises flocked to the platform because it was far superior than legacy middleware products. That’s still true. But now, companies are doing much more than a simple “rip-and-replace” of older systems. IT leaders are getting more sophisticated. And Amith’s “smart app” is a great example of what’s becoming more commonplace. He’ll show you the world of possibilities that exists when you combine Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, functions, and machine learning together.

Wednesday, October 10 • 12:15 – 12:45

Deploy my Application Across Multiple CF with Persistent Data

Vick Kelkar, Redis Labs

Once you deploy Cloud Foundry in one location, you’re going to deploy it in a second location. It’s just a matter of time. Managing the platform across sites is straightforward enough. Here’s what’s not as simple: keeping your backing services highly available and consistent. It’s even harder when you deploy apps many times month, in more than one place.

Thankfully, some best practices and common patterns have emerged. Vick from Redis Labs explains how you can keep your apps running smoothly across sites while you replicate of their respective data stores.

Wednesday, October 10 • 14:30 – 15:00

Leveraging Istio & Envoy to Deliver New Capabilities in CF

Shannon Coen & Aaron Hurley, Pivotal

Istio and Envoy promise to simplify how you build, run, and secure microservices. In an ideal world, this tech would be invisible to you as a developer. Your chosen platforms should simply embed a service mesh. This way, you can take advantage of these features…even if you don’t know they are there!

That’s the plan for Cloud Foundry. Shannon and Aaron tell you about the community’s progress, and how you can contribute.

Wednesday, October 10 • 15:10 – 15:40

More Secrets of Successful Cloud Foundry Adopters

Dormain Drewitz, Pivotal

So you have Cloud Foundry up and running. Congratulations! Now the fun part begins – getting your organization to use the platform to improve business outcomes.

The first thing to do in this situation: see what others in your situation have done. What have the successful companies done to encourage the use of Cloud Foundry? Are there harmful practices you should avoid?

Lucky for you, Dormain has studied the most successful adopters and shared her observations. In this talk, she’ll share an updated set of strategies, processes, and tactics for your consideration. Contemplate these secrets. Then, apply them back at the office to help your team achieve new heights of productivity!

Wednesday, October 10 • 15:50 – 16:20

Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes – Did it Blend?

Bernd Krannich, SAP SE, Simon Moser, IBM, Jeff Hobbs, SUSE, Chris Crall, Google, Ulrich Homann, Microsoft, Cornelia Davis, Pivotal, & Swarna Podila, Cloud Foundry Foundation

What a great panel. And the topic certainly warrants this excellent set of speakers. Let’s set some context.

Any savvy developer will tell you that Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes aren’t competing projects. They are merely different abstractions, each one is good at something different. That means you’re going to have Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes running in your enterprise. And you should use the right abstraction for the job.

That said, you shouldn’t have your app platform and Kubernetes running siloed. You need to find ways to bring them together, for operational consistency and a stronger security posture.

So how is this effort going? The panelists will revisit the progress made in the last year, what we’ve learned, and what’s next. If you’d like additional context, watch last year’s talk. It’s embedded below.

Wednesday, October 10 • 16:50 – 17:20

Continuous Security: Inject Pipelines With Critical Protection for Your Apps

Kamala Dasika, Pivotal, James Wickett, Signal Sciences, Simon Maple, Snyk, & Josh Kirkwood, CyberArk

At Cloud Foundry, we aim to “shift left” when it comes to security. That’s a fun way to say “we think about security earlier in the development process.” It also implies that your security tooling should be built-in, not bolted-on later. Platform engineers have best practices they can follow. (Use the 3 Rs!).

But what about your custom code? And there’s likely a fair amount of code you didn’t write that’s running on the platform — like open-source libraries and third-party container images.

Here, a panel of security experts will help you understand how to ensure the security of your containers and apps throughout the lifecycle without negatively impacting frontline productivity.

Wednesday, October 10 • 17:30 – 18:00

Sky is the Limit for Cloud Foundry at AirFrance-KLM

Nathan Wattimena & Fabien Lebrere, AirFrance-KLM

Last week at SpringOne, Boeing shared incredible stories about their usage and adoption of Cloud Foundry. Now, hear from AirFrance-KLM on how their cloud-native journey is coming along. This all-up transformation story promises to be one of the highlights of the Summit!

Let’s start off our preview of Day 2 with another exciting enterprise story: Rabobank.

Day 2

Thursday, October 11 • 11:15 – 11:45

Migrating Rabobank Online from Monoliths to Microservices with Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Vincent Oostindie, Rabobank

Yes, we all know that you need to be good at software these days. The trick is actually doing it. And that’s just what Rabobank has done! Vincent will compress 10 years of change into a single session. Don’t miss out!

Want a preview of Vincent’s CF Summit talk? Check out his keynote from SpringOne Platform:

Thursday, October 11 • 11:55 – 12:25

Pipelines Done Right

Derik Evangelista & Diego Lemos de Resende, Pivotal

We all love stories about the enterprises that push code to production 10,000 times a month. Another fun metric to show how fast you are going: the number of apps you have on build pipelines. Attend this session, and learn how to increase this number! This talk promises to be a fantastic overview of how to get your build pipelines to run properly, so you can “deliver value, from developers' keyboards directly to customer's hands.”

Thursday, October 11 • 12:30 – 12:50

How I Built a Store Locator Application You Can Use with Cloud Foundry, Spring, and the Google Cloud Service Broker

Matt Broomfield, Google

What happens when you combine Spring, Cloud Foundry, and the service broker for Google Cloud? Magic! Matt will show you his particular brand of magic in this quick talk. It’s reminiscent of another CF Summit talk, the retail demo.

Thursday, October 11 • 14:50 – 15:20

Experience Report – How to Make a Legacy Java EE Application Cloud-Ready Using Community Buildpacks and Cloud Foundry

Matthias Haeussler & Thosten Jakoby, NovaTec Consulting GmbH

Cloud Foundry is for all kinds of apps, not just 12-factor apps. Matthias and Thosten will show you how to update a WebSphere-based Java EE application to run on CF. They’ll use the Liberty buildpack too!

Thursday, October 11 • 15:30 – 16:00

Saving Lives – Accepting Donations at Scale Across Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes

Zenon Hannick, Armakuni, Caroline Rennie, Comic Relief, Shane Huston, Paula Kennedy & Debbie Wood, Pivotal

You trust your most important apps to Cloud Foundry because the platform can scale to support you during critical business events. The holiday shopping season. An important product launch. And then rising millions of pounds in 7 hours. Wait, what? You heard that right. Let’s just quote the abstract directly:

Each year, Comic Relief raises tens of millions of pounds to fight poverty. A significant proportion of this is received online over the 7 hours of primetime television coverage. A few minutes of downtime during this period could mean missing out on millions of pounds to help those that need it most. In this session, speakers from Comic Relief, Pivotal and Armakuni share their experiences of building, scaling and running a mission-critical multi-region multi-foundation solution on Pivotal Cloud Foundry; with apps hosted on the Pivotal Application Service (PAS) and other production workloads running in Kubernetes clusters provisioned by the Pivotal Container Service (PKS).

This is another can’t miss session!

Thursday, October 11 • 16:30 – 17:00

Digital Empathy

 Panagiotis Xynos, Engineer Better

If you’re a developer working on distributed systems, pair programming is the way to go. But the transition from a more traditional dev environment to an agile setting can be jarring. Panagiotis will share his learnings from his journey to the world of paring.

Don’t Forget About Office Hours!

Got a specific technical question? Want to contribute to the project? Passionate about a future conference topic? Then office hours are for you! Swing by for an informal chat with project leads and team engineers to discuss the state of a given project or component. Here’s the schedule of when Pivots will be holding office hours for their respective areas.

Wednesday, October 10

11:35 – Loggregator & Oratos – Adam Hevenor, Pivotal

12:15 – BOSH Windows / Garden Windows – Matthew Horan and Shanfan Huang, Pivotal

14:30 – BBR – George Lestaris, Pivotal; BOSH – Marco Voelz, SAP & Morgan Fine, Pivotal

15:10 – Buildpacks – Stephen Levine & Scott Sisil, Pivotal

15:50 – CF Dev / CF Local – Stephen Levine & Scott Sisil, Pivotal; Routing – Shannon Coen & Networking – Amelia Downs & Christian Ang

16:50 – Diego – Eric Malm, Pivotal

Thursday, October 11

11:15 – CAPI – Zach Robinson, Pivotal; CLI – Abby Chau, Pivotal

11:55 – OSBAPI & SAPI – Matt McNeeney, Pivotal

14:10 – Release Integration – Josh Collins, Pivotal; UAA – Sree Tummidi, Pivotal

14:50 – CFCR – Colin Humphreys, Pivotal

See You in Basel!

We hope to see you at the show. As usual, Pivotal will be easy to find! Swing by our booth for a chat with one of our helpful Pivots. We’ll have nifty demos, thoughtful answers to all your questions, and of course swag! Can’t make it there in person? Follow along on social media via #CFSummit.