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> We are focused on subscription sales of our platform. Since announcing PCF in November 2013, our subscription customer count has grown rapidly to 319 as of the end of fiscal 2018. Our subscription revenue was $95.0 million, $150.0 million and $259.0 million for fiscal 2016, fiscal 2017 and fiscal 2018, respectively, representing year-over-year growth of 58% and 73% for our two most recent fiscal years.
The only two experiences I had with Pivotal were with RabbitMQ (a very well designed product) and with Pivotal Tracker - I tried it about a year ago. I felt like I was fighting the software; they were extremely stubborn about adhering to Scrum 'best practices' that may not work in practice.
The thing is, their flavor of Agile development absolutely does work in practice, and it is hands down the most reliable way to build great software I have ever seen. However it only works if it is pretty much 100% adhered to, hence the stubbornness.
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Much of the process revolves around trying to ensure everyone on the team can tackle any problem in any part of the codebase. This is accomplished by doing all work paired, rotating pairs daily. Similarly the consultants assigned to your team are regularly rotated in and out to different projects during your engagement. Specialization is highly discouraged, so the result is a mix of people who can kinda accomplish mo…
Seems to be really successful, though, no? I'm not defending them, but I know I'd love for my shop -- we do the same things as them -- to grow in this way.
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Much of the process revolves around trying to ensure everyone on the team can tackle any problem in any part of the codebase. This is accomplished by doing all work paired, rotating pairs daily. Similarly the consultants assigned to your team are regularly rotated in and out to different projects during your engagement. Specialization is highly discouraged, so the result is a mix of people who can kinda accomplish mo…
So specialization is a precondition for non-cogs?
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Could you elaborate?
Much of the process revolves around trying to ensure everyone on the team can tackle any problem in any part of the codebase. This is accomplished by doing all work paired, rotating pairs daily. Similarly the consultants assigned to your team are regularly rotated in and out to different projects during your engagement. Specialization is highly discouraged, so the result is a mix of people who can kinda accomplish mo…
I am no capitalism apologist. The interoperability of technicians diminishes our marketplace bargaining power, thus diminishing labor's leverage over management/capital. At this point in my life, I have accepted this trade-off in exchange for 1) mutual code-review, 2) nights off on-call, 3) opportunities to learn new tech, 4) a product roadmap that can be prioritized without a freaking gant-chart to slot e.g. language-dependent work into language-adherent technicians' backlogs.
While these and other factors make my role less stressful, and my team more effective, I do concede that knowledge dissemination diminishes tech workers' bargaining power.
This is the first I'm hearing of Pivotal. Are they a cloud provider or something? I'm having a hard time figuring out exactly what they do from their website.
They basically make a Java-based application abstraction layer that sits on top of AWS, Azure, VMWare, etc. Basically a platform for managing storage and compute across multiple on-prem and cloud providers. It’s real enterprisey stuff — as in, it’s probably not even interesting to you until you’re big enough to run in a half dozen data centers and within all the cloud providers.
You can run whatever you like, even Windows stuff. You only need to have (a) build pack(s) (aka runtime layer) and a stemcell (base operating system).
CF is like Heroku on steroids or like Lamda+API Gateway+Services for more complex applications.
And Pivotal provides one product of Cloud Foundry ( Pivotal Cloud Foundry), that can be deployed to various Cloud Providers (such as AWS, Azure or OpenStack). There are other vendors, like IBM (Bluemix).
I guess, you mixed it up with the Spring ecosystem, which surely a big driver in the adoption of Cloud Foundry. Pivotal is the core maintainer of the ecosystem.
And no, you don't need to be a big enterprise to run a CF.
That said, I just can't understand why you'd ever pick PCF over Kubernetes. Sure, I get one deploys application code, and the other deploys containers. But after using the buildpack system for a while, I really think containers are the better solution (assuming you have the CI/CD to keep your custom containers up-to-date with new base images).
So it'll be interesting to see what Pivotal does there, and how they position PCF, especially now that they have their own branded version of Kubernetes[1].
[1]. https://content.pivotal.io/announcements/introducing-pivotal...
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They are a super trendy development and cloud consultancy firm based in San Francisco and New York. They have all the right words and everything. Pretentious start time of 9:06 am, signalled by a gong. All pair programming on iMacs. I visited their very shiny office for a tech talk. Two employees (they call themselves Pivots) used the exact same language to describe how good the strict schedule is. I struck up a conv…
This is unnecessarily cynical. I did a couple consulting stints at Pivotal, working on the CF team. They have a very particular methodology that evolved from the earliest days of agile (Rob Mee was a friend of Kent Beck back when XP was being worked out). I walked in there as a very experienced engineer and a healthy amount of skepticism... and it turned out to be a fantastic learning experience. I've since taken the…
I think it's pretty clear that these strict agile processes work well for some and poorly for others - some people do better in a highly structured environment and others do worse - it's a bit like remote work on the other end of the spectrum.
The criticism and pushback comes from the negative experiences devs have had when management pushes a one-size-fits-all approach.
I've been involved in more than 5 failed agile methodology process improvement initiatives. I've seen great engineers reduced to a tiny fraction of their former productivity and seen other "hopeless" engineers get a lot better.
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Seems to be really successful, though, no? I'm not defending them, but I know I'd love for my shop -- we do the same things as them -- to grow in this way.
As a commercial venture, absolutely. There will always be folks willing to buy the dream they sell.