Key takeaways from SpringOne Platform by Pivotal 2018

Business is happy with delivery acceleration and developers are happy with focusing only on writing code — Key Takeaways from Spring One 2018 in Washington D.C. SpringOne Platform was an amazing, large-scale event. As an IT consulting company, we were more than excited to be a Silver Sponsor of a conference which gathers hundreds, if not thousands of cloud experts in one place. Now that we’re back and the whole event winds down, we thought it would be a great idea to take a minute, look back and share with the world what we have learned at this year’s edition of SpringOne Platform. It seems like the best way to sum up the whirl of presentations, keynotes and tech talks is to break everything into the following:

Operating at scale

There is a lot of fuss going on around Kubernetes nowadays. The excitement is, of course, completely reasonable, and we could witness it in its pure form during workshops and at all the booths in the community hub. In addition to that, several presentations also hovered around the topic of Kubernetes. For example, there was an interesting speech about the K8s basics:  “All You Need to Know to Deploy Applications on Kubernetes” , but what was also in the center of attention was the aspect of operating at scale, which is the key feature of the platform. On top of that, Pivotal has also announced in  “Buildpacks Anywhere” that they are working on open buildpacks to run both on CFCR and PCF, which might be yet another game-changer on the market.

Apache Geode community meeting

However, if there was one thing that attracted the most attention at the conference, it would be the Apache Geode — a data management platform originated as commercial Gemfire. There were over 10 workshops on this topic, from such basics as  “Geode: Much More Than a Cache” , through an open panel  “Questions, Answers, and Oddly Specific Opinions with Apache Geode Committers” to quite complex topics like  “Implementing PII Encryption with PDX Serialization” . Not to mention all the success stories of large companies and banks which only proves the scale of the solution and how it’s getting more and more mature.

Kessel run

Part of SpringOne is always about business success stories for companies that use Cloud Foundry or Kubernetes in cooperation with Pivotal. One of the most amazing ones which definitely deserves a little more "airtime" than the rest is "Kessel Run" project of U.S. Air Force (no, it’s not a typo, the name does indeed come directly from Star Wars!) which is a cloud-native startup inside the DoD.
During his presentation, Capitan Byron Kroger (@bjkroger) explained in depth how they dealt not only with difficulties but also with all paperwork which was slowing them down at that time. And he proudly sports our Oh My BOSH t-shirt which gives him additional points

Reactive and event-driven methodologies

A great focus was also put on  the modern solutions and technologies, especially event-driven architecture in the cloud . Apache Kafka can definitely help with that and it makes architecture simpler and cleaner. All this was explained in this one presentation from Neha Narkhede, the co-creator of Kafka. On the main stage, Olive Gerkie and Rossen Stoyanchev announced R2DBC - Reactive Relational Database Connectivity Client which is still in its early stage of development but has already gained a great deal of momentum and may revolutionize how developers connect to databases from Spring. That topic was also further explored in  “Reactive Relational Database Connectivity” and some other lectures.