When businesses collaborate on open technology projects, everyone wins. That was the prevailing message throughout the Cloud Foundry Summit in Frankfurt, Germany.
Operators, developers, users and cloud providers gathered to share best practices and reflect on the state of this growing community. In the two years since the Cloud Foundry Foundation was launched, the community has grown tremendously, as these highlights show:
More than 31,000 code commits
2,400-plus code contributors
More than 130 core contributors
65 member companies
17 new member companies in 2016
195 user groups
53,050 individuals
Contributors from 132 cities
Cloud Foundry Foundation CEO Sam Ramji called open source collaboration “a positive-sum game,” meaning that just by participating, members inherently benefit. “The more people who play, the more we win,” he said. “The more you give, the more that is available to everyone.”
Ramji also said that this is “the beginning of a 20-year revolution around what cloud platforms can be.”
It’s ultimately up to the community and its wide stakeholder base to ensure that the revolution is a productive one.
IBM Bluemix continues to grow
IBM offers the world’s largest Cloud Foundry environment with its IBM Bluemix platform. It was on full display during the conference in breakout sessions and even on the mainstage.
Michael “dr.max” Maximilien, a scientist, architect and engineer with the IBM Bluemix team, joined Simon Moser, an IBM senior technical staff member, during the opening keynote to provide an overview of some of the lessons they’ve learned from working in a Cloud Foundry environment.
“Embrace the weirdness.” @mosersd & @maximilien share lessons learned from @IBMBluemix at #CloudFoundry Summit. pic.twitter.com/kJXklTivQX
— IBM Cloud (@IBMcloud) September 27, 2016
The conversation continued with a number of breakout sessions highlighting the emergence of #serverless technology in general, particularly OpenWhisk, an IBM open-source, serverless offering. Maximilien told the crowd in his breakout session that OpenWhisk is a continuation of the IBM tradition of launching exciting, new open tech projects.
“We want to help lead the serverless movement,” he said. “Think of OpenWhisk as a push in that direction.”
Kim Bannerman, who leads the Technical Advocacy and Community team inside the Office of the CTO at IBM Blue Box, hosted a panel on serverless technology that featured Ruben Orduz and Tyler Britten, both technical advocates for IBM Blue Box, along with Casey West and Kenny Bastani of Pivotal.
It was clear that we’re still in early days for this technology, as much of the conversation revolved around the question, “What is serverless?” It will be some time before we start to see real-world use cases and more enterprises adopting it. Still, its potential is clear.
A few of the highlights from that session:
Is it Functions as a Service? Event-driven computing? At CloudFoundry Summit, the serverless discussion goes beyond buzzword. pic.twitter.com/pMpR4DeBZB
— IBM Cloud (@IBMcloud) September 27, 2016
Closing the gender gap
One noteworthy topic strung throughout the conference was the gender gap across the IT profession. While the industry is doing a better job of welcoming women into what’s been a traditionally male-dominated sector, there’s still a long way to go in hiring more female developers, ensuring equal pay and seeing more women at the executive level.
On Wednesday, Ursula Morgenstern, global head of consulting and systems integration at Atos, took to the mainstage to deliver a hopeful message that #cloud computing could represent the catalyst that brings more women into the field.
Problems exist at all levels: entering IT, being stuck in the middle and not getting to the top CloudFoundry @u_morgen pic.twitter.com/uVi2bgOqhC
— Paula Kennedy (@PaulaLKennedy) September 28, 2016
“It’s not just about gender. Ethnically diverse companies outperform their competitors by 35%” – @u_morgen CloudFoundry #diversity pic.twitter.com/37c5YJQroF
— Cloud Foundry (@cloudfoundry) September 28, 2016
Later that day, IBM sponsored a diversity luncheon, which brought together Cloud Foundry community members to discuss issues and potential solutions for advocating for a more inclusive IT industry.
Moving forward
As the Cloud Foundry community looks toward the future, three of its leaders— Jason McGee, VP and CTO of IBM Cloud Platform; Duncan Johnston-Watt, CEO of Cloudsoft, and Stormy Peters, VP of Developer Relations at Cloud Foundry—explained what members must do to advance the cause and promote more interoperability and cooperation between foundations.
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