6 Must-Attend Talks at Cloud Foundry Summit on Serverless, Knative, Microservices

Feb 19th, 2019 3:00am by Bryan Friedman

Cloud Foundry Foundation sponsored this post.

This is the first part in a series of contributed posts that will publish in advance of Cloud Foundry Summit North America, to be held in Philadelphia on April 2-4, 2019.

I was recently at a birthday party that served cupcakes. I know for most people it’s probably impossible to go wrong with little cake morsels covered in frosting. Except, I thought these were actually a little too sweet. For me, too much frosting can overwhelm with sweetness. Not enough frosting, though, and you’re left wanting more.

Bryan Friedman

Bryan is a Director of Product Marketing for Pivotal where he helps customers understand how to transform the way they build software. Prior to Pivotal, he worked at a large telco as Director of Product Management for Infrastructure. Before this experience in the cloud product management space, he also spent over ten years working for an enterprise in a variety of information technology areas. He lives in Southern California with his wife, two daughters, and dog Princeton.

Tech conferences often feel the same to me. It’s all about the ratios. Too much technical stuff and you wonder how any of it actually applies to your business problems. Too much business-speak and you might end up looking for a slide deck escape hatch to take you to a code repository. Like Goldilocks eating porridge, or me eating a cupcake, you want to find a mix that’s “just right.” Finding a good balance between deep technical content and compelling business outcomes makes for a better conference. (Now that I think about it, so would serving cupcakes!)

This is one reason why I love Cloud Foundry Summit—the ratios are right! There are always plenty of compelling user stories where you can follow what companies like Allstate, Royal Bank of Canada, and CSAA have been able to accomplish with Cloud Foundry. But Cloud Foundry Summit has a lot to offer for tech enthusiasts too, including plenty of opportunities to learn about related projects and emerging technologies. Last year, Kubernetes, functions, and event-driven architectures were hot topics.

This year’s Cloud Foundry Summit is right around the corner with another excellent mix of business and technical discussions. And, thankfully, serverless is a big topic of conversation. If you’re as intrigued by all things serverless as I am, here’s my list of must-attend talks:

Data Streams

Data stream processing is fascinating; it’s part of what makes event-driven architectures possible. There’s a good chance your organization is digging into Kafka and Spring Cloud Streams. If so, make sure to check out these two “deep dive” talks:

Comcast is giving a talk called Deep Dive: Cloud Foundry Stream Processing, where they’ll show how to create and deploy a Cloud Foundry Kafka Streams application. (A technical talk from a Cloud Foundry user? Double bonus points!)
Richard Seroter will be building a data pipeline with Spring Cloud Data Flow as part of his session, Deep Dive: You Can Run THAT on Cloud Foundry?

Functions

Microservices and twelve-factor apps are the dominant patterns of modern development. While these are already staple topics at Cloud Foundry Summit, there is growing interest in writing and using functions as well. Here are some perfect sessions where you can learn more about working with functions on Cloud Foundry:

Don’t miss Jenny McLaughlin’s talk on Making Functions and Microservices Work Together. Especially if you’re a .NET developer, this one is right up your alley.
You will also want to check out Graybar’s Heritage to Modern-day Systems presentation. It’s a practical look at using Spring Cloud Functions along with Knative.

Knative

Speaking of Knative… it’s the serverless framework announced at Google Next last year that’s built on Kubernetes. It has since gained a lot of traction as a standard for serverless development. If you’re looking for more info on Knative, two sessions at Cloud Foundry Summit can enlighten you:

In one session, Dr. Nic Williams from Stark & Wayne and Dr. Michael Maximilien from IBM will compare and contrast Knative versus Cloud Foundry. This will be excellent for seasoned Cloud Foundry users who are curious about Knative.
For the second talk, please indulge me in a bit of self-promotion. I will be presenting Getting Started with Knative along with my colleague Brian McClain. Definitely check out this one for a compelling overview of everything Knative has to offer. We like to live dangerously, so we’ll have a live demo, too!

That’s a lot of technical content, so make sure to also get your ideal ratio of business impact content and check out the User Stories track.

There may not be cupcakes, but it’s still always great to get together and connect with the rest of the Cloud Foundry community. I look forward to seeing you in Philadelphia! Register for Summit before the price increases after February 22nd.

Feature image via Pixabay.

Bryan is a Director of Product Marketing for Pivotal where he helps customers understand how to transform the way they build software. Prior to Pivotal, he worked at a large telco as Director of Product Management for Infrastructure. Before this...