 Good afternoon. My name is Michael Grimshaw. I am with Acton software out of Portland, Oregon And I'm here talking about the business of velocity See in Q4 of last year my COO Bill Piersnick was preparing to update our board of directors on our decision to move forward with Pivotal Cloud Foundry Bill approached me and asked me to put together a list of things as to why we chose to move forward with Pivotal Now let me ask a quick question. Has anyone here ever worked with engineers before? One or two of you. Yeah Let me ask you this. What happens if you ask an engineer to put together a list of cool things they like about a technology They are totally geeking out about Yeah Engineers don't just get caught in the weeds We dig down to the roots and try to determine the pH balance of the soil to a confidence Confidence interval stretching out 12 decimal places. That is what engineers do Now Bill knew this. Bill's a smart guy. He's worked with a few engineers over the years So as Bill turns to walk away, he pauses and he looks back at me and he says Grimshaw I only need three or four bullet points. Okay Great. I already had this list running through my head and now he wants me to try to break this down to three or four bullet points Okay, Bill so I go back to my desk sit down and I start thinking through it and I Trying to figure out. Okay. What do all these things have in common? What is the core business value that ties all this together? It was at that point it occurred to me The business value that all these features provide comes down to one thing Velocity Velocity is the speed of something in a given direction Now any one of the things on that list is pretty cool on its own But when working together as a system Pivotal cloud foundry provides act on software speed in the direction of returning business value to our customers Fast innovation in returning business value to our customers is kind of a mantra at Acton And I hope it is for your company as well For those of you who might not be too familiar with my company Act on software provides market a marketing automation platform specifically focused in adaptive marketing and lead management Being a visionary company an innovator a market leader, etc. Is something we take really seriously to act on We work hard to be at the top right of that top right quadrant We are so serious about it that we've doubled down in our R&D investment over the course of this last year Pivotal cloud foundry is a core component tying all that R&D investment together One more thing I want to point out is that we are focused on being profitable Because this is also where velocity comes in Sure you can get momentum if you throw a ton of resources at something But that doesn't necessarily translate to velocity. In fact, it can even work against it Our CEO Kate Johnson is an amazing amazing woman to work for her background is finance specifically in the tech sector She has a laser-like focus on ROI. Yeah, she will absolutely green light investing in the business but It better be lean and it better be able to demonstrate a serious return on that investment Kate is focused and Focus is something that often gets missed when discussing velocity Velocity doesn't mean busy not at all velocity doesn't even necessarily mean speed Velocity is speed in a given direction Velocity requires focus and Focus on returning value to your customers is something that can easily get lost the bigger your infrastructure footprint becomes The more resources you devote towards supporting your systems The less resources you have to provide new features and new services to your customers This is why pivotal cloud foundry is a core component of Acton's technological roadmap You see we have business requirements that dictate a wide a wide infrastructure footprint We have customers and services that require running in a physical data center running on VMware We have customers in AWS in Oregon and the EU We are also moving into Azure due to market demand And we can see a possible need to be running on GCP in the future If your business case requires more than a handful of servers You want something managing all that complexity so you can devote your resources Towards the features and services that actually make your company money This is the power of pivotal cloud foundry In the traditional IT model you managed and supported the entire stack And you paid the price and the resources required to configure orchestrate manage and support that stack Then along came in a long came infrastructure as a service great a significant amount of that management support was covered Though not so much the configuration and orchestration parts which themselves also required their own management support And while not reflected in this image another stage that came along was containers The level of complexity that containers brought basically doubled or removed so much of the advantage that IAS provided configuration especially in orchestration configuration artifact management all that was added back into the stack that IA that a Lot of the stuff that IAS had removed. I remember when Docker came out Everyone was talking about right once one it run anywhere great idea. That sounds awesome. I want that And that was great for developers But one of the things that didn't get nearly as much press Was the management of the run anywhere piece The complexity in running anywhere adds to DevOps the complexity that running anywhere adds to DevOps and ops is not insignificant Cloud Foundry abstracts away your infrastructure so that you can have the same rhythms of configuration orchestration and management and support regardless of your infrastructure Again the more resources you devote towards managing and supporting your systems The less resources you have to provide new features and services to your customers You want to abstract all that away so you can keep your focus So you can gain Velocity Now I've got to give major kudos to the to the person who opened my IAS wall of this He's the best CTO I've ever worked for and he's a guy by the name of Phil Sims and no I am not saying that just because he is in this room Since Phil became my CTO I've had a crash course on pivotal Cloud Foundry and the velocity it brings You see I was the guy that wanted to coat all this stuff together When Phil came in and started talking about hyper-converged architecture and a multi-cloud staff strategy I was like yes, I love it. Give me some Python give me some Ansible Give me give me Docker and let's piece it all together and and and oh and let's throw in a whole bunch of other So software to support that to try to support that to try to accomplish that in fact I Had spent four months Grinding away trying to update an open-source platform That let's just say it wasn't exactly backed by the Cloud Foundry Foundation or any other foundation for that matter. I Was at the point of hacking the hacking the the build installer together just to try to make it work for our specific use case And make that clear four months During that time my CTO Phil kept talking to me about pivotal Cloud Foundry. I Hate to admit this especially since he's still sitting here, but I just kind of thought that Phil had drank and quite a bit of the pivotal Kool-Aid But I had an epiphany towards the end of those four months I realized that our customers don't pay us to support the infrastructure that we want to build our Customers pay us to support the services. They want to use So after hitting a wall at four months, I went to Phil and I said okay I do not want to be a blocker to our developers and while I am not Willing to drink the Kool-Aid I'll give pivotal Cloud Foundry a try. I'll do a proof of concept Here's how that POC went First day I dug into the documentation and got a bunch of and got the search together Second day. I had a full pivotal Cloud Foundry Pull full pivotal Cloud Foundry up and running Third day we had services deployed That was all with a single a single platform engineer At that point I went back to Phil and I said okay, I'll drink the Kool-Aid. In fact, give me a picture. Yeah, I'm on and That was just the POC To get a staging environment up took one month Again with a single platform engineer To get a full production environment We brought in pivotal for a dojo and doubled the size of our platform engineers Yeah, we now had two and you know what in one quarter. We had a control plane running concourse We had concourse building and repaving a production deployment PCF in both AWS, Oregon and Germany We had the entire building code and it was interacting with our existing infrastructure and for We had a full suite of production services running on it in both regions ladies and gentlemen That is velocity For us pivotal Cloud Foundry means velocity Velocity is the key the faster you can provide Value to your current and future customers the happier that makes your customers the happier that makes your board and happier that makes your team For act on Software our current and future customers value security if they value stability and they value scalability Including the ability to scale up new features and services So let's take a look into how pivotal Cloud Foundry provides velocity to those values office of personnel management Equifax Yahoo Marriott Adobe does that bring any bills? Tell me let me add a few more. How about this Stuxnet? flame Eternal blue want to cry not Petya. Okay, I think you guys know exactly where I'm going. Thank you folks know exactly where I'm going this The business cost of not Petya alone was valued at over ten billion dollars And that's just the cost of being compromised That doesn't cover the cost of your customers losing trust and faith in you There's also the cost of being compliant GDPR ISO 27,000 PCI HIPAA NIST 853 R4. I'm not going to say that five times fast Hopefully, I don't need to make the make the case for the importance of security. I Don't think I need to make that case Because I think your customers already are security matters Part of Acton's R&D investment has been a big push into security enablement We brought in a new director of security. Let me tell you I do not mess with our director of security to give you an idea Our director of security is former army Is fluent in multiple languages has a jurist doctorate? Oh and is a powerlifter Does that sound like someone you want to mess with? I don't think so here. Let me introduce you to our director of security Ladies and gentlemen, this is Hadass and that is another mantra at Acton Hadass gets what Hadass wants The easier I make it the easier I make it for Hadass to get what she wants the easier my life becomes And let me tell you pivotal cloud foundry makes my life easier First way it makes my life easier is what it includes straight out of the box Single sign-on want to turn key solution to securing access to applications and APIs. That's what there's a tile for that Federated SSO like SAML check active directory integration LDAP integration octa integration check check check Open ID connect no problem. And and there's a whole host of other options. What about secure credential management? There's a tile for that. This is credit hub credit hub centralizes and secures credential generation storage life cycle management and access There's a credit hub service broker to handle secret management for your applications And in case you use hashy corp vault. There is also an integration between credit hub and hashy corp vault Compliant scanner you can scan Linux VMs to make sure they're compliant and configured correctly in addition to all those tiles There's file integrity monitoring IP security clam AV and those are just some of the highlights But to give you an idea of the security velocity that they came out of the box that we experienced at Acton The SSO tile took a day to install configure and integrate with octa one day Now we also know that security is more than just cool tools. What about compliance? To start with those cool tools are there to provide velocity towards compliance Having a platform that makes it easy to integrate security features. That was a big plus for us But it goes beyond the tools No small part of comp-compliance policies procedures and documentation This is also where pivotal cloud founder makes your life easier For example with GDPR becoming an industry standard You're gonna want to know all the potential places where PII could be stored in your in your platform Here's the documentation for that it even provides recommendations on configuration changes required to work in a G GDPR compliant environment What about HIPAA? This actually is that long nist 800 53 r4 et cetera control But the HIPAA PHI regulations can be cross-referenced to this control set and you see that list on the side the left hand It goes through everything in pivotal cloud foundry and tells you where the compliance features that are covered by Covered by the the platform and what you have to do on your own This document here can provide wonderful guidance to how to ploy or how to ployers may achieve compliance when using a shared responsibility model In addition to that pivotal also has quite a few white papers that cover various compliance use cases Support is there if you need it and if also if you need it, there's professional services Now unfortunately, there's not a tile that will magically make your organization compliant But there are a ton of tools recommendations and documentation that can provide velocity in that direction now What if you want to take your take your platform to a whole new level as far as? Hardening even beyond current standards. What if you want to greatly reduce your exposure to advanced persistent threats and Want to avoid like what happened to the office of personal management and others and want to try to keep Adversaries from gaining a long-term foothold in your in your systems Let me introduce you to repave repair and rotate now I've got to admit this is something I've been totally geeking out about By leveraging concourse Bosch and pivotal cloud foundry is native high ability high availability architecture You can refresh your infrastructure on a regular cadence weekly or even daily if you'd like Basically long and short of it is every week you apply the latest security patches Rebuild your entire platform and rotate the credentials all with zero downtime The best thing about this is if you've taken an infrastructure as code approach to your Pivot cloud foundry deployment You have everything you need to implement it right there Now sure a bad guy might have found a zero-day exploit or leveraged a social engineering vulnerability But they really with the repair rep with the repave repair and rotate model They really have a very short time period to try to break out of the native sandboxing and Exploit that in a way that causes a compromise It's the difference between a hacking attempt and being compromised So that's the idea of the speed of security we've begun to experience to act on Now let's look at another area that our customers value When we brought in Pivotal for a platform dojo one of the first questions they asked was what our SLA was for that layer of our infrastructure When we said five nines, we were a little concerned with their response was and you know what their response was Okay The more I've done to get into the architecture of Pivot of cloud foundry The more I've understood why so many organizations both big and small use it and bank on its ability For those of you relatively new to Pivotal cloud foundry Here's the plot here. Here is the foundation of the platform stability Bosch now Is anyone in this room ever been on call? Actually, my guess is everyone in this room has probably been on call Sure, your name might not be in the pager duty notification But if you're in the C-suite or anything with management you shared that same dread of that phone call coming in the middle of the night Now your nightmares might not be based on a server on fire But your night nightmares might rather be about burning through cash flow and burn customers While Bosch does unify release engineering deployment and lifecycle management of both the VMs and the software they run on The biggest reason I love Bosch is because of its self-healing ability In a nutshell Bosch has the Bosch has the logic built into it that if a VM or the application running on that VM is Operating in less than a perfect manner Bosch tries to remediate Bosch tries to remediate the issue and if it can't fix the issue It says alright, I'm gonna spin up a new instance I I'm gonna spin up a new instance that I know works and I'm sending the traffic there And then I'm just gonna tear down that old instance Oh, and the other nice thing about Bosch is it's based it is built so much high availability is built into it that you Don't have to worry about taking a big hit on your SLAs Now when I was testing Bosch's pager-duty integration, I also happened to be on call during that time We didn't have any filters or rules set up at that point So I was I was getting I was getting a lot of pages shall we say I was getting paged on everything that wasn't operating Perfectly I got to the point where I actually Look forward to those pages Because I'd first get a notice that saying hey, this isn't working as we expected to this isn't working as Bosch's expects it to And then immediately right after I get a notification saying this is how Bosch has fixed it This is how Bosch handle it. So all I've got to do is resolved resolved resolved Stability in Pivotal Cloud Foundry is built from the bottom up And while Bosch is built for Pivotal Cloud Foundry, it's not It's not only for running Pivotal Cloud Foundry for software. You can't or don't want to run in containers You can run it on Bosch Again, even beyond the self-healing capabilities of Bosch you have your configuration management HA release engineering and deployment automation Hardened operating systems I could go on the list is the list is long But one of the things in fact one of the things that we are currently doing it act on is Reviewing our legacy infrastructure to determine what can be run on containers And the things that can't be run on containers We are we are preparing to do our own Bosch releases for and the best thing about it is a lot of that stuff We won't have to write our own Bosch release because the level of community support out there the Bosch releases that are already out We can reuse a ton of that I'd recommend if you're looking at Pivotal Cloud Foundry and you're curious about Bosch definitely spend some time on Bosch I O It's an incredibly helpful website, and if you don't even want to go there go to get up and start looking for some Bosch releases There's a ton of stuff out there for That's the great thing about this platform It truly is a platform. It can provide stability even for the things that you don't run CF push on Okay, here's my final point about stability Yes, the platform just works Now if you're new to the cloud Foundry scene or or maybe only at this stage considering cloud Foundry You might be wondering just how much Kool-Aid. I've had to drink. I Understand that I understand that so much because I've been there myself Not long after Phil my CTO came to act on he brought a consultant Dmitri that he'd worked with in the past Besides working with Phil Dmitri had also spent a few years at Pivotal on day three of our PCF POC Dmitri took me out for coffee and he says if you're gonna move forward with Pivotal you need to know a few things He said you need to have an idea what's coming and One of the first things he told me was be prepared You're gonna be accused of drinking the Kool-Aid. He said you are going to be you are going to be accused of reading only the marketing material and and and that is why you made the decision and well I've got to say Dmitri was darn near prophetic at that point because yes It happened. I mean in that conversation. I looked back to Dmitri and I said hey Dmitri. That's not gonna happen I'm a dork, you know, I read documentation. I dig through github. I just built a PCF PCF installation myself No one's gonna accuse me of that. He goes it doesn't matter That's what people are gonna say And you know what he was absolutely right, but here's the thing. I can't blame people for saying that Because I was one of the same people you think it's the Kool-Aid, but when you get in and actually use it You realize this stuff just works When you when I started working with it and especially when I became responsible for it is when I realized this level of stability provided Now the truth is if you want your platform to work for you, you have to work on it And this leads me to one of the last few the last few items. I need to cover Pivotal cloud foundry provides significant velocity, but velocity itself also has some significant requirements I've mentioned how we got this platform through the proof of concept and Interstaging with only a single platform engineer working on it now in case that sounded like I was advocating a lone wolf strategy I want to tell you very clearly it absolutely not nothing could be farther than the truth First I have been blessed through this whole process with some great great developers some incredible software engineers Through this whole process. I worked with a guy by the name of Curtis He's a software engineer and team-leaded act on and in fact Curtis was the first person who called a pivotal and got Aaron Hyrer our account representative in in in act on itself And and even beyond Curtis there's other engineers a guy by the name of a seal a guy by the name of Ben They totally dug into the platform They had some experience in spring, but they self-taught dug into the documentation and taught themselves how to leverage themselves They onboarded themselves into PCF and currently today are working on building the training Building the training mechanism to onboard other developers. You need good developers to get good velocity Second thing you need is an incredible platform team There is no way I could have gotten PCF in production in multiple data centers without a solid platform team Inger who's the other platform engineer that worked on production and was there with a With air through the dojo She has a background in both DevOps and web development and she is also one of the hardest working people I've ever had the pleasure to work with In fact during the dojo some of the pivotal team said man Inger she she does the work normally covered by four people. That's how hard she works Another member of our platform team is the guy by the name of Gabe. He's a QA and he's a QA architect And while we were building the platform He was testing new QA new testing processes. He was building Testing processes. He was doing significant work in in our new our new environment of CICD And he was leveraging the Alteros Jenkins tile and the cool thing was he was working on developing on PCF While we were even building the thing the fourth member of our platform engineering team is our the director of enterprise architecture a Guy by the name of Michael Walker who is also my product owner Now the reason I say not just the names, but what these people's backgrounds are is to give you an idea of of If you put together a good platform team the type of velocity you can get out of it I say that to recommend as a model. It is absolutely amazing. What happens if you get? Platform engineers with DevOps platform engineers working with QA people working with architects the velocity That you can get out of all those people Coordinating together is off the chart They worked as a team to get pivotal into act on oh and Is the coordination from that type of team is off the chart? third Third point here and this is key. This is huge is You need the support of leadership Let me rephrase that you need the support of leadership No small part of the velocity we experienced at Acton was due to fill my CTO Bill my COO and Kate my CEO Clearing the runway so we could receive the velocity we could get the velocity we did They worked as a team to get pivotal into act on and to ensure that the project was successful leadership is key and leadership is key for this next requirement of velocity cultural change To get velocity you will experience cultural change and in fact cultural change will be a requirement You will need a customer-centric mentality Empathy for your customers that was covered in the keynote so well last night Empathy for your customers. You will need to be grounded in lean agile practices. You need a DevOps mindset and You absolutely Absolutely must treat your platform as a product Give your platform give your platform team a product owner Give your platform team the bandwidth to continually develop and work on the platform Give them the ability to treat the developers as their customers and Be ready for them to give you some serious velocity finally Nailed down a clear narrative for what you're doing and what you're trying to accomplish This is another thing. I can't overstate narrative matters narrative helps Turn your use cases into stories not just agile stories, but organizational stories. What is your story? What is the story of your organization and? Make sure it is a customer focused one that really really makes a difference and In making these stories don't hesitate to leverage your demos One of the things that I did when we did When I was working on the staging deployment was I strung together a whole series of demos Videos all sharing the same thing pounding the same thing over and over and over again and That shared narrative that shared theme helped tremendously The reason it helps tremendously is it helps set expectations and gets people sharing the same vision now I Don't know what exactly I don't know exactly what your vision is. I don't know what the your company's vision is But I can give you a list of things that can speed it along the path And that path is Velocity Thank you