“Change is being inflicted upon us”
The open source developer community is working through an incredibly disruptive moment, at both the societal and industry level. While it’s almost impossible to predict the outcome of the current moment, one thing is clear: the world is changing, businesses are changing, and society is changing in some profound ways, Craig McLuckie, vice president of product at VMware, said during the virtual 2020 Cloud Foundry Summit North America.
Technology disruption has fueled innovation in many industries throughout history, but this period feels a little different, according to McLuckie, who is also one of the founders of the Kubernetes project. “The rate of change is propelling us at an unprecedented level,” he explained.
Developers: a “catalyst for future success”
Developers play a critical role and will be a “catalyst for future success” in what will ultimately differentiate organizations that are able to navigate the changes onset by the pandemic, he said. The ability to compete and prosper in this changing environment will be driven by whether enterprises tap into developers’ capacities to support an increasingly complex and evolving ecosystem.
And then there are emerging tensions among teams charted with delivering infrastructure outcomes, teams responsible for constructing platforms for general development consumption, and teams that represent lines of business, McLuckie said.
“Agile teams need agile infrastructure,” he said. “As we see those tensions starting to pull apart there’s an absolute need to bring technologies like Cloud Foundry into the mix because I think it elegantly spans those gaps. And by harmonizing technologies like Cloud Foundry with the emerging infrastructure abstractions like Kubernetes, I think we’ll create disproportionately positive outcomes for organizations large and small.”
“By harmonizing technologies like Cloud Foundry with the emerging infrastructure abstractions like Kubernetes, I think we’ll create disproportionately positive outcomes for organizations large and small.” – Craig McLuckie
Giving Developers Back Their Time
Developers at most organizations are spending an inordinate amount of their time, roughly 80%, on engineering versus developing or actually solving business problems, according to McLuckie. But skewing the emphasis towards developing is the mission of our community, he added.
The open source developer community has an amazing opportunity to bring these two worlds together by looking at technologies like Cloud Foundry as a way to facilitate and support those environments, and Kubernetes as a way to reduce the complexity of deploying a very broad cross sections of workloads into a infrastructure environment, according to McLuckie.
“This mission to democratize technologies will serve us well, allowing us to bring a very sharp focus to developers and create an opportunity to take a positive step forward in bringing together two of the most robust and healthy open source communities out there,” he said.
Watch the complete Cloud Foundry NA Summit 2020 panel “Why Empathy Matters in Infrastructure Technology” below:
