[stickfigure]

I consulted at Pivotal on and off over the last several years and got an up-close look at the process. This a heroic feat.

In a short matter of years, they took a consulting services company, adopted some poorly designed abandonware from VMWare, and rebuilt it into a product that now serves some of the biggest companies in the world. Pretty much everything has been rewritten and almost all of it is available in github.

CloudFoundry is not sexy software. It's basically Heroku that big stodgy companies can run in-house. Startups will never use it; they can use actual-Heroku. The crazy thing is that Pivotal supports these huge enterprise software installations inside other people's data centers, often without direct access. It's really, really hard work.

I really hope this makes a bunch of my friends rich - they deserve it.

[meddlepal]

I know some folks at Pivotal as well. Congrats to them! I'm a bit depressed looking through some of the comments on here. It feels like people don't understand or care what Pivotal has done and is doing and are writing it off because of the tech rather than the idea and implementation.

[taurath]

The optics that they use to get consulting contracts with non-tech big-co's are the exact opposite that you'd want to cultivate to impress HN.

[afeezaziz]

Please do explain this. I would love to understand what is the modus operandi.

[statictype]

To sell, you need to speak the language of your target audience. Pivotal's audience is enterprise customers, so their website is naturally filled with enterprisey messaging - high on 'outcomes' for decision makers and low on nitty gritty details.

HN's audience is not really the same (broadly speaking). A landing page that shows you how simple it is to deploy a python function into production on Pivotal Foundry would probably be a better sell here.

[cryptonector]

Explain?

[busterarm]

Beach-heading, for starters.

[chubot]

Interesting... I was watching a bunch of Cloud Foundry talks on YouTube around the 2010-2012 era (my memory is hazy).

What happened to it? Why did VMWare abandon it? As far as I remember it was written in Ruby / Event Machine. As I understand it, Heroku also has large parts in Ruby, so that isn't a problem by itself.

How did Pivotal get involved? Were they hired by VMWare, and then they took it over?

Why / how did they rewrite it?

I had some ex co-workers who consulted for Pivotal around 2005-2006, and I have seen their name pop up from time to time. Pivotal tracker seems somewhat popular, and then I remember their name popping up again around Cloud Foundry.

It's nice to see that they turned it into something. It does seem like a nice success story for "open source cloud". This was around the same time that OpenStack was getting going too, but it seems like the success of OpenStack has been more mixed.

[stickfigure]

Let me see if I can get the cronology right:

    * EMC bought VMWare
    * EMC bought Pivotal
    * EMC moved all the enterprisey software to Pivotal (including CF & Spring)
    * Dell bought EMC
    * Dell/EMC spun off Pivotal

I arrived shortly after CF moved to Pivotal, so much of this is lore: VMWare had been working on CF for years; they started a 2.0 rewrite which went out of control (with a huge expensive team of primadonnas); EMC basically pulled the plug and gave the software to Pivotal, who built a new team more-or-less from scratch (the only remnants of the original team were ops people). When I was there we were still doing a lot of "forensic programming" or as they say at Pivotal, building context.

When I say "pretty much everything has been rewritten" I mean it has evolved like that; they didn't sit down to rewrite CloudFoundry (Pivotal does not do rewrites as a cultural axiom). I mean that piecemeal pretty much every bit of code has been altered in significant ways. A lot of the Ruby has been swapped out for Go for performance and maintainability reasons. It was pretty funny to watch a large body of die-hard Rubyists get excited about static types (come to the light!).

As a consultant I was really a fringe player; I'm sure there are people reading this who are/were much more involved and could tell the story better.

The thing I found most interesting is that this project should have failed. A HUGE incredibly complicated body of enterprise software with near-100% team turnover? I would have bet against it ever working. But all that pair programming and rotation and writing stories and backfilling tests etc just eventually ground the problem down. It was expensive as hell and it took years but it looks like a success story now. I don't know of any other big takeover project like this that worked. It's a huge credit to the people working on it, and yes - to the "Pivotal process" that seems to irk so many people in this thread.

[chubot]

Wow didn't realize it was so tangled. Considering all that turnover, it's even more of a miracle! Thanks for the recap.

I agree with the philosophy of "grinding it down". Writing quality software is largely about doing the straightforward thing, and not regressing, for years on end... At a certain size, it's too big for any heroics to make a difference, and you have to rely on plain old "engineering" (tests, prioritization, etc.)

[zimbu668]

> How did Pivotal get involved? Were they hired by VMWare, and then they took it over?

Pivotal Labs got bought by EMC in 2012, who also owned VMWare. A year or so later EMC spun out Pivotal Labs combined with VMWare and some other companies(Green Plum) in a new company under the Pivotal name.

[Turbots]

Another super important part of Cloud Foundry is the underlying VM automation layer called Bosh [1]. It used to be extremely high learning curve, but its also very powerful. Cloud Foundry could not exist without it, but it can be used for automation of other packages of software as well (the CI/CD tool Concourse for example)

Cloud Foundry is VERY mature nowadays, is completely opensource and is part of the Linux Foundation. You can view it as Linux, which is the vanilla opensource version and which has different distros (CentOS, Ubuntu, ...)

Cloud Foundry is the vanilla opensource version, and there are many (commercial) distros available, like Pivotal Cloud Foundry, IBM Bluemix, SAP Cloud Platform, etc...

[1] https://bosh.io/

[rjkennedy98]

Openstack isn't the competitor to CloudFoundary- OpenShift is. Both are sponsored by Red Hat.

[jypepin]

Are there any good resources out there about how pivotal works in details? A book, or anything else you could recommend?

[dv35z]

Check out these resources:

- https://docs.cloudfoundry.org/concepts/architecture/

- http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920042501.do

- https://content.pivotal.io/ebooks/cloud-foundry-the-cloud-na...

[jypepin]

ah my bad I meant more the work practices at pivotal (labs?). They seem to be using a very specific flavour of agile with pair programming etc. I'd be interested to dive more into it.

[mathgorges]

Pivot here. Here's the book we give to everyone that rotates into labs for the first time: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0321278658/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_tTuU...

[SlowBro]

> adopted some poorly designed abandonware from VMWare

I'm late to the game here; was it GSX Server a.k.a. VMware Server?[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware_Server

[sturadnidge]

It was Cloud Foundry, Spring, RabbitMQ and at the time they were sponsoring Antirez (Redis).

[hiram112]

Which is a bit misleading as far as Spring is concerned.

Spring has never been abandonware to the Java community. It is probably the most used framework for enterprise - I've seen maybe 10 jobs looking for Spring experience vs the JEE crap that it has mostly replaced.

I know it gets a bad view on HN - a lot of FactoryBuilderFactoryBeans and a rather large kitchen sink of APIs.

But the framework itself is well written, great docs, lots of resources.

I've been involved in a dozen different projects where the architects hated Spring and instead went to some newer hipper lang like Flask, Django, Rails, Finatra / Finagle. Spring has a learning curve, but once you get it, it is far more powerful and stable than any of these alternatives.

[antirez]

I think GemFire as well.