Cloud Foundry Deep Dive, Part 1: The Developer Experience

In recent years, the cloud has gone from Larry Ellison's “Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about,” to Microsoft's “TO THE CLOUD!” to a central part of many companies IT strategy. At the same time, the way that we consume the cloud has continued to evolve. Many of today's cloud efforts revolve around utilization of various “infrastructure as code” products (e.g. Puppet and Chef) and homegrown automation to create deployment pipelines. When we start at this level, we often end up reinventing many of the same wheels as we climb the abstraction ladder.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings are positioned to allow developers (and operators) to start climbing the abstraction ladder from a higher rung, shifting the model from machine-centric deployment to application-centric deployment. This session will focus on life as an application developer using Cloud Foundry as a PaaS, with demos using Pivotal's Hosted CF at http://run.pivotal.io.

We'll cover the following topics:

  • Hello World: Pushing Java, Ruby, and Node.js apps
  • Service Binding: Talking to DB's and other services
  • Buildpacks: Flexible application runtime stacks
  • “Places to Put Your Stuff”: organizations and spaces
  • Promotion Pipelines: Dev to Test to Prod
  • Scaling: From 1 instance to 100 instances in 30 seconds or less!
  • Health Manager: No more 2 AM support calls…
  • Blue-Green Deployments: Zero downtime for your users
  • Deploying Cloud Foundry in YOUR data center
  • It's Open Source and YOU can contribute!

Matt Stine

About Matt Stine

My passion is taking a metaphysical approach to software engineering: what is the nature of the collaborative game that we continuously play, and are there better, more contextually-aware ways to play that game?

By day I lead a team tasked with taking a first-principles-centric approach to intentionally enabling programming language usage at the largest bank in the United States.

By night I write and teach my way through a masterclass in software engineering and architecture targeting early-career software engineers working in large-scale enterprise technology organizations.

What is the primary goal?

To win the game. More seriously: to get 1% better every day at providing business value through software.

Who am I?

I'm a 22-year veteran of the enterprise software industry. I've played almost every role I can imagine:

  • Software Engineer
  • Software Architect
  • Technical Lead
  • Engineering Manager
  • Consultant
  • Product Manager
  • Field CTO
  • Developer Advocate
  • Conference Speaker
  • Author
  • Technical Trainer
  • Technical Marketer
  • Site Reliability Engineer
  • Desktop Support Specialist

I've worked at Fortune 500 companies, a tenacious teal cloud startup, and a not-for-profit children's hospital. I've written a book, and I've hosted a podcast. I've learned a lot along the way, including many things I wish I'd known when I first got started. And so now I want to pass those learnings on to you, especially if you've only just begun your career.

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