In this installment of our Q&A series with speakers who will take the stage at our inaugural Cloud Foundry Summit Berlin, we hear from Springer Nature’s Daniel Otte, Head of Platform Engineering, and Simon Johansson, Platform Engineer, who will give an inside look at how they (and you) can go “From Weeks to Minutes…For Real.”
Daniel Otte
How did you get involved in Cloud Foundry?
Mid 2014, in the quest to move away from legacy infrastructure, and with microservices on the horizon we decided that we needed a private PaaS. At the time there were only 2 serious contenders, and 2 new kids on the block. OpenShift, Cloud Foundry, Deis and Flynn. After spending some time evaluating all of them it was pretty obvious that Cloud Foundry was what we needed. It was flexible, did not tie us into a certain way of working, it already had quite some momentum. We could deploy it onto our current enterprise infrastructure without any hassle, which was not true for any of the other contenders. In the end we made the right choice. CF rocks, both for Ops and Dev.
What are you speaking about at Cloud Foundry Summit Berlin?
We will tell our story, how we went from big monoliths to microservices using CF, from an Ops perspective. How we prevented 900 apps turning into 900 snowflakes :D. Cloud Foundry has brought us much closer to our dev teams, everyone is very excited about the benefits we got from our journey.
Simon Johansson
What do you hope people will learn from your talk?
That everything is possible, even in a large organisation. Grassroots movements do work, just involve the right people and build trust. That business critical systems can run on open source community software, if you give your technical people ownership and trust.
What excites you about being part of the Cloud Foundry ecosystem?
It’s great being part of a open source project, a serious one. Development happens in the open, and there is discussions in the open about how to move the project forward. Its also nice to know that should we need it there is always support, either on the mailing lists, IRC or from specialists.
