Skip to main content

Must See TV

In my earlier years, NBC Television had a slogan for their primetime television line-up: Must See TV.   It really was must see, because there wasn’t a great way to watch it later if you missed it and most people in the office were talking about what happened the next day.  So, if you missed it, you either got a verbal recount of the show or you waited 6 months.  I have been to way too many conferences in my career and very few of the main stage presentation or keynotes would fall into what I would consider the Must See category.  SpringOne Platform 2017 provided us with LOTS of those moments, and thanks to recordings and streaming video, this Must-See TV can be posted for easy consumption.    If you missed the event, I encourage you to at least take a look at the replays of the Keynotes from S1P.   The Pivotal speakers all kept their presentations light, yet informative with a good dose of humor.  I will be the first to admit that vendor presentations at these events are typically something I avoid, but each of the Pivotal speakers was cognizant of that fact and kept the presentations tight and to the point without jumping into a typical sales pitch.   That being said, the highlights for me were the customer speakers:  A diverse range of customers walked on stage and gave an honest and enlightening presentation about what the journey to cloud-native computing has meant to them personally and their businesses.  I am normally a bit snarky when it comes to presentations I find no value in (just ask my team), but that didn’t happen much during the 3 days.  I won’t comment on all of them, but here is my list of Must-See SpringOne Platform TV:



  • Onsi Fakhouri:  https://content.pivotal.io/springone-platform-2017/pivotal-cloud-foundry-2-0-rob-mee-onsi-fakhouri.  Tuesday kicked off with Onsi and Rob Mee.  Rob spoke very briefly and immediately handed off to Onsi Fakhouri. If you have never seen Onsi present, PLEASE PLEASE watch this video, and I promise you will not be disappointed.  Onsi has the most unique and conversational style I have ever seen in a presenter and his slides are less slides and more dynamic visualizations of the words he is speaking.  His style is often imitated, but I haven’t seen anyone replicate it just yet. 
  • Lieutenant Colonel Enrique Oti: https://content.pivotal.io/springone-platform-2017/lieutenant-colonel-enrique-oti.  It was surreal to hear an Air Force officer talk about their journey to Cloud-Native applications and how those applications affected the efforts of the Air Force in tangible ways.  Their transition to these new models should inspire almost ANY organization to move forward because we are all aware of the challenges government IT workers face in technology and red tape.  I walked away thinking…. “If the freaking Air Force can solve this level of problem, why am I in line at the DMV for hours?”  \
  • Distributed Systems Lightning Talks: https://content.pivotal.io/springone-platform-2017/cornelia-davis-6.  I will freely admit, my snark woke up early on during this presentation and found it’s way onto our Team Slack channel.  My comment had nothing to do with the quality of the content, I was just a confused as to the point of the content considering it’s placement on the agenda.   Just a couple of moments later it all became clear.   I highly encourage you to watch this segment…you will learn something about technology and something about the wonderful people in our industry
  • Home Depot, MasterCard, and Comcast Customer Panel:   https://youtu.be/joJN_oTtHG4.  Some really interesting insights in this panel of customers and varying stages of cloud-native rollouts.  Comcast is really impressive in the work they are doing, but also the scale at which they approached this conference.   They sent a keynote speaker, multiple breakout speakers, and a boat-load of others as attendees.   
  • Nikki Allen of Boeing game a great talk about changing the culture in a 100-year-old company with 150,000+ employees.  It’s definitely must-see TV, but unfortunately, the recording isn’t online at the moment.   

I purposefully kept this list short, so it is by no means an exhaustive list of Keynote sessions to watch or rewatch.   There will be a ton of breakout session content available as well and almost every session I attended was awesome.  The only negative experience I had all week in a session was not content related, but I made it known it was the worst session I had ever attended.  It was a session by one of our best technical minds, Kenny Bastani.  Unfortunately, he was a victim of his own popularity and the popularity of the book he co-wrote (Cloud Native Java).   Every seat in the room was taken, there were probably 40+ people standing in the back,  and lots of laptops were open with people eager to see into Kenny's mind and record everything they could.  The content was right on point, but the temperature rose very rapidly, until after about 10 minutes I had sweat running down my face and I zoned out.  Luckily, all the content was recorded and I will be able to re-watch that session (and so should you) in the cool comfort of my home-office.

The job the SpringOne team did lining up the speakers and content for not only the Keynotes, but also the technical breakouts, was amazing and they deserve a lot of kudos for a job well done.  SpringOne has gotten better each time I have attended, so I expect the 2018 incarnation to be the best yet.   Go ahead and mark it on your calendar and join us in Washington D.C. next year.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is Hadoop Dead or Just Much Less Important?

I recently read a blog discussing the fever to declare Hadoop as dead. While I agreed with the premise of the blog, I didn't agree with some of its conclusions. In summary, the conclusion was that if Hadoop is too complex you are using the wrong interface. I agree at face-value with that conclusion, but in my opinion, the user-interface only addresses a part of the complexity and the management of a Hadoop deployment is still a complex undertaking. Time to value is important for enterprise customers, so this is why the tooling above Hadoop was such an early pain-point. The core Hadoop vendors wanted to focus on how processes executed and programming paradigms and seemed to ignore the interface to Hadoop. Much of that stems from the desire for Hadoop to be the operating system for Big Data. There was even a push to make it the  compute cluster manager for all-things in the Enterprise. This effort, and others like it, tried to expand the footprint of commercial distributions...
1 comment
Read more

CF Summit 2018

I just returned from CF Summit 2018 in Boston. It was a great event this year that was even more exciting for Pivotal employees because of our IPO during the event. I had every intention of writing a technology focused post, but after having some time to reflect on the week I decided to take a different route. After all the sessions were complete and I was reflecting on the large numbers of end-users that I had seen present, I decided to go through the schedule and pick out the names of companies that are leveraging Cloud Foundry in some way and were so passionate about it that they spoke about it at this event.   I might have missed a couple when compiling this list, so if you know of one not on here, it was not intentional. Allstate Humana T-Mobile ZipCar Comcast United States Air Force Scotiabank National Geospatial-Int...
Post a Comment
Read more

Isilon HDFS User Access

I recently posted a blog about using my app Mystique to enable you to use HUE (webHDFS) while leveraging Isilon for your HDFS data storage.   I had a few questions about the entire system and decided to also approach this from a different angle.   This angle is more of "Why would you even use WebHDFS and the HUE File Browser when you have Isilon?"    The reality is you really don't need it, because the Isilon platform give you multiple options for working directly with the files that need to be accessed via Hadoop.   Isilon HDFS is implemented as just another API, so the data stored in OneFS can be accessed via NFS, SMB, HTTP, FTP, and HDFS.   This actually open up a lot of possibilities that make the requirements for some of the traditional tools like WebHDFS, and in some cases Flume go away because I can read and write via something like NFS.   For example, one customer is leveraging the NFS functionality to write weblogs dir...
1 comment
Read more