Ecstatic after the successful conclusion of the first ever Cloud Foundry Day hosted by SAP Labs India, the SAP team is proud to share highlights from the event! Read on — and find out how to host your own Cloud Foundry Day!
Cloud Foundry Days are meet-ups designed to bring together the community around Cloud Foundry, to encourage the spirit of learning by sharing and, of course, to facilitate networking with the experts and fellow Cloud Foundry developers.
On September 2, 2017, SAP Labs India organized Bangalore Cloud Foundry Day 2017 at our Bangalore campus. The event promised an exciting line-up of speakers, both from the community and from within SAP.
Although the rain gods had plans to play spoilsport with an incessant downpour, the event saw 150+ enthusiastic participants braving the weather for a chance to attend and learn.
At the helm was Master of Ceremonies, Ms. Padmashree B from SAP, who opened the day with a detailed agenda to highlight what the audience could expect from the day ahead.
We kicked off the day with an excellent keynote from Mr. Vishnu Prasad Hegde, Head of SAP Cloud Platform Core India, who set the stage by reiterating the fact that these are exciting times for all of us to be working on Cloud Foundry and the “openness” it brings to the SAP Cloud Platform. The keynote also emphasized all the work going on at SAP around open source contributions and giving back to the community.
Next, our first external speaker, Mr. Vidyasagar Machupalli, Developer Advocate from IBM Bluemix, talked about developing a Cloud Foundry application from scratch on the IBM Bluemix platform. He also showcased a demo application around Stock Portfolio Analysis which consumed Cloud Foundry services from the Bluemix platform and advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) services from IBM Watson. The highlight from this session was the simplification Cloud Foundry brings to the application development and deployment process.
This was followed by a session from SAP on Managing Enterprise-grade backing services for an Enterprise-grade Cloud Foundry. In this session, SAP Cloud Platform Core India development architects Jagadish Basavaraju and Subhankar Chattopadhyay showcased Service Fabrik – SAP’s multi-cloud, enterprise backing, service provisioning, management and operating solution, which was recently proposed as a Cloud Foundry incubation project. The session successfully highlighted the need and motivation behind building Service Fabrik which adds much-needed enterprise capabilities for management of enterprise-grade service instances, like High Availability (HA), Backup & Restore and service monitoring. The speakers also showcased the possibility of bringing your own backing services to be managed by Service Fabrik. This message resonated with many participants who had faced similar problems with service management and expressed their willingness to consider the possibility of collaborating with SAP to enhance the Service Fabrik project.
As we all know, any community is as strong as its contributors. In this light, the Cloud Foundry Day team recognized the Cloud Foundry contributors in the audience and highlighted the importance of their contributions to the community. Mr. Hegde also took this opportunity to encourage other participants to contribute and strengthen the Cloud Foundry community.
After a quick recap of the first half of the day and a quiz, we broke for lunch where the participants had the opportunity to connect and network with speakers and experts to exchange ideas over a sumptuous lunch buffet.
The event reconvened post-lunch to be treated to another informative session on Common Service Broker Architectures from Mr. Sriram Komanduri, our second external speaker. Sriram, who works with the Predix Cloud Data Services group at GE Digital, went on to show commonly used service broker architectures and when each of them could be used. More importantly, the session prominently highlighted the pitfalls one might encounter when building a service broker and suggestions on how to overcome them. The session fit seamlessly into the running theme from the first half of the day, on service provisioning and management, and rounded off the service developer perspective on Cloud Foundry.
Next, we kicked it up a notch to look at Cloud Foundry from an application developer or service consumer point of view. Mr. Karthikeyan Loganathan, Chief Development Architect from SAP spoke about Building Next Generation Applications on Cloud Foundry. The session highlighted the challenges of developing applications on the cloud and the factors that need to be considered when developing such an application. It highlighted aspects like security, multi-tenancy and other aspects which go unnoticed until the actual development starts, and how Cloud Foundry provides services–concepts which can help a developer achieve these aspects in his/her application.
The last session of the day was from our third external speaker, Mr. Atul Nagar, Solution Architect, Dell EMC Converged Platforms and Solutions group, who shared with the audience the journey of Dell EMC from transforming monoliths to microservice development paradigm. In his talk on Monoliths to Microservices – A Journey to Cloud, Mr. Nagar candidly explained to the audience about the mindset shift that was needed to truly “think” microservices-based architecture and adopt this methodology for cloud application development. Audience members whose teams/companies are undergoing a transformation to move to the cloud found the session and the learnings shared by Mr. Nagar to be extremely useful.
The day ended with a recap of the afternoon sessions and a quiz to validate the learnings gathered along the way. Our emcee Ms. Padmashree B closed the event with a vote of thanks, thanking the speakers, community members and the organizing team for all their contributions in making the event a grand success!
Personally, it was an amazing experience to be part of the first-ever, one-of-a-kind community event. It opened my eyes to the fact that a lot of the challenges we face in our move to cloud are common to other companies. Events like this where experiences and learnings are shared openly benefit everyone who is in the process of or considering such a transformation.
With SAP getting into the open source game, events like Cloud Foundry Days will encourage development and collaboration across organizational/company boundaries which will result in innovation without bounds!
I’m really looking forward to many more Cloud Foundry Days in the future.
Want to host a Cloud Foundry Day somewhere in the world? Learn more here.
