Rain or Shine
The Boston marathon draws a crowd of 30,000 track and field fanatics willing to run 26 miles in sleet, snow and near-freezing temperatures. Over the weekend, thousands of out-of-towners braved torrential rainstorms and flooded roads to cross the finish line and receive a coveted medal in pouring rain.
As the marathon got underway, there was a smaller, at scale community making its way towards Boston as well. These are the nearly two thousand end users, developers, CIOs, open source contributors and committers, and platform enthusiasts who are attending the Cloud Foundry Summit, in rain or shine.
We decided to move our Summit eastward this year to reflect the geography of so many of our users — who are based in New York, Boston, DC and other east coast hubs for financial services, government and industry. When we decided on Boston, we realized the marathon dovetailed with our own messaging, so we devised Running at Scale as our theme for Summit — for both the word play and the relevance!
Keynote Stage Highlights & Member News
Our priority at Summit is our end users, which Abby Kearns highlighted on stage during her opening keynote on Wednesday afternoon. Presenting findings from our 2018 1H User Survey (published yesterday), Abby emphasized the ways in which users like Volkswagen and the Home Depot rely on Cloud Foundry to ensure happy and efficient developers, and revealed the data that proves Cloud Foundry saves time and money for business. This benefits development teams and line of business leaders.
Abby also made some significant announcements about new Certified Platforms and Cloud Foundry offerings, which further reflect the needs of the Cloud Foundry ecosystem. These announcements include:
- In addition to becoming the Foundation’s newest Gold member, Alibaba Cloud announced it now has access to both Cloud Foundry runtime workloads, thanks to its new CPI, ensuring seamless interaction between Alibaba Cloud and Cloud Foundry.
Hong Choing, Director of Business Development at Alibaba Cloud, joins Abby Kearns on stage to make the announcement
- SUSE Cloud Application Platform has become a Cloud Foundry Certified Platform, making it the only distribution that is delivered via 100 percent open source software.
SUSE CTO Thomas DiGiacamo announces SUSE Cloud Application Platform is Cloud Foundry certified
- cloud.gov has become a Cloud Foundry Certified Platform, making it the first government agency offering a certified distribution based on Cloud Foundry Application Runtime. Thanks to its FedRAMP authorization, cloud.gov focuses on offering a certified Cloud Foundry platform to federal agencies.
- IBM announced an experimental offering that will help developers build cloud apps with enhanced security and stability, while ensuring flexibility in different environments. This enables companies to run Cloud Foundry in a dedicated environment, while natively integrating with other IBM Cloud services such as AI, Blockchain, IoT and data tools.
- For a full recap of news coming out of Summit from companies like Resilient Scale, Dynatrace and more, please read our Summit press release.
Following Abby’s keynote and the many exciting announcements made on stage, she invited multiple members of the Cloud Foundry ecosystem on stage for conversations on a range of topics — from security enhancements with VMware’s Molly Crowther to use cases with Allstate’s Matt Curry to the shared values of Kubernetes, Istio and Cloud Foundry with Google’s Chen Goldberg.
VMware’s Molly Crowther discusses security with Abby Kearns
Matt Curry from Allstate with Abby Kearns
We also got to see demos from Mendix and VMware (including a light show!) and hear from Dynatrace and Humana.
The afternoon wouldn’t have been complete without a lively discussion led by TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois, who spoke with Molly, Matt, Chen and Abby about using, contributing to and loving Cloud Foundry, how the technology integrates into companies’ business solutions, and what lies ahead in the Cloud Foundry road map.
A panel discussion on Cloud Foundry ecosystem, led by TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois
After two hours of riveting discussion, everyone collected in The Foundry for a welcome reception with drinks, snacks and games.
Cloud Foundry Boston Summit attendees
A Morning for End Users, Developers, Partners
Earlier in the day, many Summit attendees and Cloud Foundry users found a home for the morning at one of several events — including User Day, hosted by Abby Kearns and Senior Director of Community Swarna Podila, and staffed by many of our beloved Cloud Foundry Ambassadors who were able to answer users’ questions and lead discussions about what does — and doesn’t — work.
In addition to User Day, there was a series of Trainings led by folks at Altoros, anynines, Capital One, Engineer Better and Stark & Wayne. These ran the gamut from Cloud Foundry beginner to expert and were community-led to ensure everyone walked away with new learnings and new connections.
VMware sponsored the Cloud Foundry Hackathon, which runs two days over the course of Summit. The winning team will be announced on Friday morning during Abby’s closing remarks. We can’t wait to see what every team came up with — the ideas are always innovative and showcase the incredible ingenuity within the Cloud Foundry community.
Finally, there was ISV Day, an event that gave ISV ecosystem partners the opportunity to network with executives from Cloud Foundry certified distributions.
Stay Tuned!
Can’t make it to keynotes on Friday? Watch the live stream — and check back on the Cloud Foundry blog for updates on Summit happenings.
Photo Credit: Donát Kékes
