Last week, Apigee participated in the CloudFoundry summit. Our primary objective present and get feedback on Apigee’s integration with CF Route Services. I’ve had a lot of opportunity to attend sessions, and talk about APIs with CloudFoundry users and vendors. I thought I'd share 10 of my observations:
1. ESBs and J2EE are now Dead, CloudFoundry is the replacement
The main driver to CloudFoundry adoption is that central IT now know that their investments into J2EE app servers + ESBs have came to an end. CloudFoundry is the "replacement" for those investments. The reason why CloudFoundry appears to be getting such FAST adoption it isn't solving a new problem, but rather it is solving an existing problems with new technology.
ESBs are dead because integration now comes in the form of Point-2-point connectivity between microservices. ESB’s “hub-and-spoke” model simply doesn’t scale when you have thousands of microservices all talking to each other. Infact ESB vendors don't even come up in the discussion, but managing communication between microservices still remains a problem.
2. Microservices Integration is the huge opportunity for API Management
API Management from day one was designed to connect thousands of services to thousands of consuming clients (mobile apps / B2B partners / etc) via external APIs. Microservices connectivity has the exact same scale challenges, so using API Management for internal APIs makes total sense. Conversations with the CF operators confirmed this hypothesis.
3. Devops = Delivering Microservices
It’s amazing the number of presenters and the crowd that actually equate DevOps with delivering Microservices. Lots of discussions was around how to better manage build, deploy, monitor, and manage microservices.
4. Installing software is boring, but there is a really passionate community around it still
It seemed that a majority of the talks is all about how to packaging and deploying software faster. It feels like ground hog day because J2EE (WAR files, rpm installer) seems to have solved these problems years ago. But that leads me to my next observation:
5. BOSH Installer is HOT
I literally have never seen a crowd so big who was that so into software that focused on software installation. Vendors and customers liked it a lot because it appears to solve deployment of large scale enterprise software in an easy way for onprem. Almost every time talking to devops people about Apigee (both for Apigee Edge and Usergrid), the question came up on whether we support BOSH installs.
6. Onprem is still REALLY import
Although there was talk about multicloud, very conservative companies in health and fintech where all running in their private data centers. That's why there was so much interest BOSH installers - it simplifies deployment On Prem. Similarly, Service Brokers solve the same problem of getting vendor software to developers.
7. 12 Factor apps is a hot topic
I was surprised about how well versed the community was about 12 Factor apps. (Think of it as the Agile manifesto for Ops people).
8. Self-Healing systems are the rage
I was actually pretty surprised to hear how many customer stories there were about system outages that was automatically repaired by CloudFoundry. My favorite presentation was on Chaos Heidi (Play on Chaos Monkey from Netflix). It was cool to hear about the Australian Goverment’s first major outage which involved waiting for 15 minutes while its CloudFoundry deployment healed itself.
9. Usergrid solves a REAL problem for CloudFoundry users = Microservice persistence
This kinda shocked me. There were lots of talks about the gaps of managing databases because database are fundamentally not container friendly. Furthermore, CloudFoundry don't solve the Database admin problem at all. Usergrid seems to solve this problem very elegantly.
10. Apigee's integration with CF Route Service Integration is REALLY SLICK
OK - This is touting Apigee’s horn a bit, but hear me out. During the CF RouteService talk - The (devops) crowd literally clapped mid way after seeing Carlo's (Apigee SE) demo of how easy it was to install Apigee’s API Management into a CF service. Lots of interest on how "seamless" it was to install Apigee for CF built apps. Kudos to Pivotal and Apigee
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