A tech conference w/o FUD and BLAHS
A conference that isn’t a giant sales and marketing circus? Yes, please.
I just wrapped up an incredible tech conference. Pivotal Spring One 2017 in San Francisco.
Prior to Spring One, my experience with tech conferences had been one dimensional. Tens of thousands of folks thronging Vegas to schmooze, drink, converse in abstract vernacular, and allocate half-hearted attention to real substance. A giant sales and marketing circus — not that I am against sales and marketing.
But, not Spring One. Spring One was a refreshingly deep learning experience.
In 3 days, I wrote code, heard impressive enterprise transformation stories, caught up with old colleagues, and engaged in strategic dialogue with Pivotal’s customers and partners who authentically believe in the power of cloud-native.
Tech has always been prey to FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) and BLAT (business level abstraction of technology). And conferences are over-ridden with FUD+BLAT. Not Spring One though. Its probably because Spring One is a “developer conference”. So when I was walking the halls, I could hear raw software language being leveraged in dialogue.
Luckily, FUD and BLAT had been contained, and the radiant originality of software engineering was allowed to flourish.
In fact, some made fun of BLAT, well BLAHS (business level abstraction of a healthy strategy)— Simon Wardley led a humorous (and deflating to some of my strategy consulting friends) keynote on using maps to convey strategy.
Speaking of acronyms, Liberty Mutual revealed one of their BAUs (bold audacious moves) — that 75% of their IT staff would need to reorient themselves as full-time coders. Because cloud-native and true agile were rapidly deeming most non-value add IT roles irrelevant.
So, my first 2 days were spent in learning Spring Cloud Services, a Spring framework for building highly distributed software. Prior to the course, my systems engineering persona held a conviction that software could not achieve resilience without the aid of expensive infrastructure.
And then I encountered the circuit breaking madness of Hystrix, the decoupling aura of Spring Cloud Contracts, the poetic flow of Eureka and Ribbon, and the potency of Spring Cloud Config Server. Within a few hours, I had extrapolated a service out of a monolithic app, created a brand new service with multiple instances, refactored the monolith to make REST calls to that service, introduced circuit breaker fall back methods on the monolith, stood up a Eureka server, registered both apps with the registry, and embedded client-side load balancing with Ribbon. I then condensed my REST client code to the brevity of ants thanks to Spring Cloud Feign.
Suddenly I was running a set of highly resilient apps on my Macbook. And I was doing it without expensive infrastructure. My systems engineering persona was, well, impressed.
Day 3 of the conference began with a myriad of Pivotal product announcements blended with customer transformation stories.
I said to myself “wow, the enlightenment movement has begun.”
Someone at the conference said to me, “in the world of software, if you optimize for efficiency, you will always end up paying more in the long run than if you had optimized for speed.” I couldn’t have worded it any better.
I could see the realization setting in — Outsourcing, commoditizing, taking short-cuts, making poor technology decisions, and investing in heavyweight proprietary software served as anti-patterns to becoming a software company.
It is no surprise that incumbent organizations for whom software and IT had remained synonymous for the last 20 or so years were investing in hiring software engineers, insourcing software development, contributing to open-source projects, getting up on stage at tech conferences, and advocating for honest digital transformation.
On Day 3 and 4, I met colleagues from a Fortune 500 company I had consulted with who talked proudly about the giant strides they had taken to transform their monolithic, tightly coupled IT landscape into an arena of highly distributed services running on Cloud. I met with systems integrators who looked super eager to learn Pivotal’s agile process so they could effectively guide their customers. I met with customers who expressed honest curiosity towards being cloud-native. And I met our amazing Pivots who were on an energy high of a rare kind, swallowed by an inner desire to authentically help people and organizations learn the art of cloud-native software.
For a tech trend to culminate into such a gripping and magnetizing wave of awesomeness in 1 place, was just, awesome.
Paul Maritz’s vision for Pivotal may have sounded vastly quixotic to some 5 years ago. But, those who attended Spring One 2017 carried an awareness that sticking to historical approaches to building and running software was like racing down the path of becoming irrelevant.
From how software is productized, built, secured, scaled, operated to how teams and organizations structure themselves around it was all rotating towards what we, at Pivotal, call cloud-native.
Change was imminent.
