The Ever-Expanding, Run-All-The Things Platform; Day 2 at SpringOne Platform 2018

The first day of main stage for SpringOne 2018 is in the books, and one thing is clear in the non-linear march of cloud architectures: the Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Spring ecosystems continue to expand the circumference of participation for the open source and enterprise developer, and for the abstractions they're running. 

No signal was clearer than today's PCF 2.3 keynote and update delivered with the usual concentrated detail and logic of Pivotal R&D head, Onsi Fakhouri. Fakhouri spoke to a packed house through the most accessible platform ever, with the same constant of helping developers focus on delivering code and value fast. Through simplification and automation, the latest platform release strengthens the loose couplings between runtime services, containers, and data stores, bringing greater ease and reliability for developers and operators alike.

Highlights:

• Pivotal Application Services (PAS), the app-centric platform, improves the UX, makes it easier to discover microservices at runtime, protects off-platform service credentials, and encrypts even more traffic as it flows through the platform.
• Pivotal Container Services (PKS) 1.2, based on Kubernetes, extends its coverage of the world's biggest public cloud providers with AWS support, and will include more self-service, enterprise-ready criteria to get Kubernetes into production. And PKS continues to be a building block for future offerings, like Knative for functions, and Greenplum on top of PKS.
• Cloud Native Buildpacks is now a sandbox project in the CNCF. The Cloud Foundry community has come to know and love buildpacks for the automated dependency management. Now, even more communities can benefit from this tech.
• The GA release of the all-new Spring 4 Tools, a new set of developer tools for Eclipse, VSCode, and Atom to help developers new to Spring boot up quickly.
• Google's Mark Chmarny, and Pivotal’s Mark Fisher gave us a peek at how Pivotal and Google are collaborating on the evolution of function-as-a-service through Knative and Pivotal’s Project riff, as the basis for the upcoming Pivotal Function Service (PFS).

Whether it's planning, running, or partnering on your code, Pivotal continues to take the best of open source, industrialize it, and make it simple, so you can run it faster and faster.

The Transformers

Jason Williams, VP of Customer Technology for Dick's Sporting Goods, touched on familiar existential pressures of digital commerce. This successful 70-year-old retailer has been on the journey from bricks-and-mortar to the "endless aisle" of digital commerce. More recently it sought to avoid technical debt and innovate faster. Dick's has rebuilt dozens of product teams to put design, engineering, and product management in lock-step, and simplified its technology stack by running on Pivotal Cloud Foundry. They're learning to fail fast and move on—and the results are coming quickly! 

Preparing for the Age of the Jetsons

Back when Ted Colbert, Boeing's CIO and SVP of Information Technology and Data Analytics, watched the Jetsons cartoon, he concluded that all their futuristic capabilities had to be grounded in a foundation of great software. Today Colbert is playing out that belief in real life, helping Boeing accelerate its 100 years of experience in marrying the physical and the digital, to launch Boeing into its own Jetsons future (think delivering freight with drones, for starters). 

Colbert laid out Boeing's two-fold journey of technology and people: delivering software and modern analytics from the Pivotal Cloud Foundry platform throughout the entire product and support value stream. The other is leveraging agile methods to transform Boeing's workforce into digitally literate teams workforce, from hiring to retiring, across the company.

Choose Your Abstraction

From IaaS, to PaaS, to CaaS, and enter FaaS, David Syer, Senior Technical Manager at Pivotal, gave a great overview on the runtime abstraction landscape. Dr. Syer noted that while all abstractions are useful, not all are useful for all problems, and applications will increasingly use them in combination to accomplish their goals. Syer also covered the trade-offs in pushing more application logic below the value line, and weighing each abstraction's ability to unify the applications, containers, and functions that work through it. He closed with the new value developers are finding through the Spring framework in the purest abstraction to date: function-as-a-service. 

Event Driven Architectures Has its Day

From typical triggers to capturing the change in application states these create, Neha Narkhede, Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer of Confluent, walked through the unique power of event-driven architectures. Explaining the distributed streaming platform Apache Kafka, Narkhede showed how the ability to continuously evolve data by leveraging data pipelines, and real-time streaming applications, are at the heart of many successful digital enterprises today. 

What's Coming for the Spring Framework 

Juergen Hoeller, Principal Engineer at Pivotal, returns to report that the Spring community and roadmap remain strong.

Notable Highlights:

• Commercial support for Java 8 through 2023.
• Java 11 goes live as the next major release cycle for Spring, backed by the same long-term commercial support for Java 8 (consuming Java 11 means gaining lots of the innovation from release 9 through 11).
• Spring framework 5.1 includes support for Java 8 through 11. Java 17 coming in 2021! 

Other Highlights from the Day:

Remember to tune in tomorrow to watch the main stage presentations at 9am EDT at springoneplatform.io