SpringOne Platform for Cloud Engineers and Operations

SpringOne Platform is a technical conference with a unique blend of developer, real-world use-cases, and operator focused sessions. Most other conferences focus on one side of that triangle, while SpringOne Platform does a great job and providing content on all the sides. 

Since a lot of my recent work has been centered on operations, I decided to take a look at what SpringOne Platform had to offer to someone that was primarily interested in cloud engineering or operations.  I categorized the sessions into a couple of topics and then chose 3-4 can’t miss sessions in each of those categories.

Developer+Operator+Use-cases

As I said before, S1P does a great job of marrying developer, operator, and end-user use cases into a single agenda. There are many instances where these three are presented in the same session. One such session that stands out to me is a session presented by JP Morgan Chase, What’s Your App Pulse? How We Built Metrics Observability in Large Enterprise Hybrid Clouds. This session will present REAL-WORLD data about operationalizing application metrics from Spring Boot into a dashboard, so both operators and developers can get easy access to the aggregated data. Another session on this same topic is presented by Charles Schwab. Using Metrics to Ensure Quality Applications in PCF.  So, 2...TWO… 2 sessions about metric observability and real-world use-cases at financial companies. Only at SpringOne Platform.  

One final session in this category that I found interesting is the one by T-Mobile,  Monitoring PCF at Scale via Custom-Build Smoke Tests Suite. They have over 40k application instances running on the Pivotal Platform and have developed a suite of smoke-tests to identify problems in their environment.  

CI/CD

Any discussion of cloud-engineering sessions would be incomplete without some quality content regarding CI/CD. There are four sessions in this category that look very interesting.  

The first is a Pivotal-led session that will cover how to use Spinnaker if you have multiple sites: Highly Available and Resilient Multi-Site Deployments Using Spinnaker. There are a couple of great Platform Architects presenting some lessons learned from their work supporting large customers.

The next session, again Pivotal-led, will walk through how to leverage automated canary analysis to make deployment decisions within Spinnaker: Cutting-Edge Continuous Delivery: Automated Canary Analysis Through Spring-Based Spinnaker. Spinnaker is incredibly powerful, but you definitely need to know what you’re doing to harness that power.

The Reality of Managing Microservice Deployments at Scale: You Need a Spinnaker is a session featuring JPMorgan Chase. It will cover the need for automation when attempting large scale application deployments. In my opinion, hearing from a real enterprise user of a product is so much more valuable than just hearing about the features and functions.

Finally, The Continuous Platform presented by Cerner. Platform as a Product is all about treating your application deployment environment like its an application. So what does that mean? It means enabling automation and continuous delivery from development/testing to production usage of the platform itself. No more manual installs, because those are error-prone. This session will detail how Cerner continuously delivers the Pivotal Platform from the Pivotal Network to production usage in 1-3 weeks.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is becoming part of every cloud-engineering/operations conversation. It’s the new IaaS. In a few short years, we have moved from bare-metal to virtual machines, to the container-craze. If you say Kubernetes 3 times out-loud, I believe a new cluster will be created.

The first session that caught my eye, was A Pathway to Multi-Tenancyin Kubernetes. This one intrigues me because multi-tenancy in K8s is a very complicated issue and is pretty hotly debated. Capital One has deployed a lot of K8s, so it will be interesting to hear a real-world opinion on the subject.  

Next, if Cornelia Davis (@cdavisafc) is speaking at a conference and you don’t attend her session you are missing out. At this conference, she is presenting PKS is Not JAK8sP (Just Another Kubernetes Platform).  This should be an interesting discussion of the realities of operationalizing Kubernetes in the enterprise.  

The final session in this category sort of straddles the line between the CI/CD and K8s categories, but I put it in with the K8S sessions because that’s the main topic.  PKS Automation Station...All Aboard: Enabling Team Access to PKS with a Concourse Pipeline will detail how Dick’s Sporting Goods built a pipeline with Concourse CI to deploy their Kubernetes clusters with PKS, but also provide user access to the clusters.  Yet another cool example of automation in the enterprise.

Security

The final category I will take a look at is security, after all, isn’t security the last leg of the application deployment race? It shouldn’t be, but more often than not...it is.  Securing Cloud Foundry at Prime Therapeutics can show you how at least 1 company changed that and built security into their DevOps workflow.

We often talk about Day 1 deployment, and what happens Day 2, but Day 3: Security Auditing and Compliance is all about the ongoing security implications with production deployments. This session will be presented by 2 of Pivotal’s finest security minds.

And finally, Policy Enforcement on Kubernetes is an interesting looking session about enforcing and validating your Kubernetes security posture. This is an important topic with K8S usage growing so rapidly, so I hope to see a full room.

Join us in Austin!

In addition to these, and all the other sessions, the keynotes are always incredible, and we will have a couple of unique surprises in the Pivotal booth that you should come to check out. SpringOne Platform will be a great event, and I hope to see you there. 

REGISTER NOW! Use code: S1P200_DBaskette to get $200 off the registration.