Changing Roles

It has been almost 2 years since I've posted anything in this blog.  In July 2014 I decided to leave Disney, and more significantly, change roles. At Disney I had been leading the engineering and analytics teams of a central data service. In my not-so-new role at HP I'm on the product management team for the Helion Development Platform, which in it's current incarnation is known as HPE Helion Stackato, a Cloud Foundry based Platform as a Service.

I was (and still am!) excited to do Product Management. As an engineer I have seen how essential the consistent application of product vision and stewardship can be to an engineering effort. I did not know if I really had product vision or was just delusional, but I wanted to find out either way...

The best part about this job is that I get to think - a lot - about how to make software development better for the average enterprise engineer. The struggle is real! Most engineering teams still write IaaS based applications like they were running on bare metal servers, and that leads to a world of hurt, because an application distributed across IaaS provided resources has to contend with underlying network, compute, and storage service failures.

The promise of Platform as a Service is that it enables easy development and deployment of cloud native applications - applications that take advantage of the elasticity of the cloud while dealing with the ephemerality of the underlying IaaS. Cloud native is a concept that takes most engineering organizations some time to get their head around.

As a result, there is a significant educational aspect to my role, which I love. I get to help people to focus on creating value with software, something that has enthralled me since I was 14 years old teaching myself BASIC on my Dads IBM PC/AT.

I get to present my thoughts to various captive audiences, either at customer onsite visits or conferences. Here is a presentation from HP Discover 2015 that I think captures the problem we are trying to solve and the best approaches to take to solve the problem.

In 2016 I'm really excited because of the acceleration and rapid maturity of several key technologies that have the potential to play very well together. 

Containers, mostly via Docker, have brought easy authoring and immutable infrastructure into mainstream software development. As an example, the other day, instead of hand installing Kafka and Zookeeper onto a VM and then doing it again by hand when I needed to grow my test Kafka cluster, I just typed "docker run...", pointing to a Kafka/ZK image built and published to Docker Hub by Spotify. I got to take advantage of all of their hard work, and save the potential multiple hours required to get that image working correctly.  

Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry are viable orchestration mechanisms for distributed, container based applications, handling deployment, scaling, and failure remediation -- deployment and scaling are things that we used to do by hand, late at night, on pins and needles. Dealing with failure usually meant doubling your hardware, or writing complex startup scripts customized to each application. Both approaches are quite differently opinionated, and I can see the merits of each one for different use cases, sometimes in the same overall application stack! 

Mesos has emerged as an intermediate resource management layer that abstracts the underlying IaaS away. The emergence of next generation big data workloads running on Mesos is something that really excites me as an ex service owner who struggled to justify value of the insights provided by using big data technologies against the steep costs of hardware. Having a layer that allocates a finite resources and maximizes resource allocation across very diverse workloads makes the start up cost of new experimental data investigation much lower, and therefore much more likely. 

All of these technologies are evolving at an incredible rate. I'm excited to see, and hopefully play a role in delivering, the next generation of platforms that make these technologies easy to consume and manage, and allow engineering teams to focus on features instead of infrastructure. 

I'm trying to post more this year - the last 18 months have been a heads down, get it done, tactical march. That was great, but I think I miss key insights when I don't occasionally digest and reflect what is going on around me. I hope to do more of that here over the next year. It's a new years resolution, hopefully one that will last longer than the one I made about not eating sugar :)