In June, I attended my first Cloud Foundry Summit. I listened to company after company talk about their experiences with Cloud Foundry. After a couple days, I saw some patterns emerge, so I wrote about them and we even put together a snappy-looking infographic:
Why all the bother? The more practitioners and executives know about what it takes to succeed with Cloud Foundry, the faster they get there. We’re passed the point when companies need to navigate uncharted waters alone. In Simon Wardley’s terms, we’re somewhere between Settlers and Town Planners.
Next month, I’ll be heading to Cloud Foundry Summit Europe. Besides the many great talks by contributors, I’ll be watching the user stories. These are always rich with details about how people, processes and technologies changed. Here are five sessions I’m looking forward to — and you should be, too!
1) Getting out of first gear: Renault-Nissan Alliance
“In less than a year, our organization has embraced cloud-native development, analytics and deployment at scale”
Automotive companies are very visible adopters of Cloud Foundry. Joining the ranks in sharing their experience is Renault-Nissan Alliance. But I’m curious: what will be different here? How did they get teams between France and Japan organized? I’m looking forward to “From 0 to Global Connected Car Services: Our Journey with Cloud Foundry.” Also worth noting: The presenters call out their use of VMware Cloud Foundry, Concourse and Microsoft Azure.
2) Hitting milestones: Volkswagen
“How Cloud Foundry helps Volkswagen become a leading mobility provider”
As much as I like hearing from users sharing for the first time, it’s also exciting to get updates from users we’ve heard from in the past. That’s exactly what Volkswagen has proposed in its talk, “One Year Later: Update on Volkswagens Cloud Program.” In the year since Volkswagen last presented at the event, the company upped its Cloud Foundry Foundation membership to Gold. I’m looking forward to learning more about what’s driving (pun intended!) success at VW.
3) Grassroots victories: CSAA Insurance
“How we turned skeptics into believers”
Cloud Foundry is sometimes adopted by executive mandate. That can be a fast and effective path towards change. But that’s also why Kyle Campos’ talk stood out to me. “Bottom Up Enterprise Transformation” promises to show that the inverse can also work. This should give practitioners hope — and guidance — on how to impart change on their organizations.
4) App modernization in retail telecom: Orange
“How did we first migrate retail applications teams from legacy infrastructure to cloud-ready?”
Application modernization is a hot topic. It takes a different effort than building a new, cloud-native application from scratch. But the payoff is huge: these are the applications that run your business. As such, I’m interested in hearing “Operations From Scratch to Production at Orange.“
5) Continuous deployment in multi-cloud: Swisscom
“Take advantage of BOSH’s powerful multi-CPI feature and Concourse pipelines”
When it comes to running multiple Cloud Foundry deployments, my colleague Greg Chase uncovered the secret weapon. Managing deployments across different data centers is table stakes for multi-cloud. So, what happens when you actually start using Concourse to continuously deploy Cloud Foundry across many clouds? That’s what I hope to learn in “The Rocket Science of Deploying Cloud Foundry in Multi-Cloud Environments.“
Cloud Foundry Summit Europe is taking place in Basel, Switzerland on October 11-12. To hear these talks and more, register here. I hope to see you at the show!
