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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.

by m0meni 9y ago

discodave 9y ago
AFAIK one of the things that they are trying to do with Cloud Foundry is abstract away which cloud you're running on. They are kind-of the OG multi-cloud vendor.
exelius 9y ago
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.
- mywittyname 9y ago
  I don't foresee companies continuing to pay for the ability to switch cloud providers. Mostly because I doubt the pricing differences between providers will ever be significant enough to justify moving. I also suspect that providers will not keep feature-competitive with one another. It seems like every month, AWS is releasing new tools, and there's no way that other providers are maintaining this pace. My suspicion is each provider will specialize in non-overlapping domains. So unless your company will always be running a lowest-common-denominator site, you'll eventually encounter a vendor lock-in feature.
  - exelius 9y ago
    Well, a lot of what PCF does is help you map the services available in AWS / Azure to an internal service catalog as defined by an enterprise architecture group. This is really powerful in the “small enterprise” space ($1 billion - $5 billion) because that’s often where the EA value proposition becomes strong enough to worry about. This is the level PCF plays at; and the level they’re useful, but in my experience Pivotal doesn’t know how enterprise companies develop software. Their scrappy pair-programming Dojos don’t really build systems the way those kinds of companies need to design system requirements. So in my mind, Pivotal’s consulting services are a bunch of startup guys coming in to the enterprise world telling enterprise developers how to build java services. They’re smart and know what they’re doing, but they’re totally out of touch with the kinds of internal controls, reporting metrics and architecture management that larger companies often require.
    - einrealist 9y ago
      I absolutely disagree. Pivotal understands the "needs" of the enterprise world and they prove them wrong at every level. Its that "enterprise world" that needs to change in order to survive or at least to be able to hire new people and to manage the ever growing complexity of enterprise architecture. That's whats referred to as "Digital Transformation". Its just extremely hard for the old "enterprise world" to adopt to change that is inevitable.
  - chatmasta 9y ago
    Funny, I see the opposite trend. Technologies like kubernetes enable immutable infrastructure that’s not locked into a single cloud. There’s no reason you couldn’t build a system that regularly and automatically buys the cheapest capacity, sets up a kubernetes cluster, and deploys the latest build to it.
    - mywittyname 9y ago
      Do they make it easy to migrate from tools like AWS EMR, SageMaker, or ElasticTranscoder? It's one thing to be able to migrate VM images or microservices, but in my experience, the big draw to AWS is the features they offer beyond that.
  - raywu 9y ago
    It's not always about the price. I've come across government RFP/RFQs that require data to be stored locally (through cloud or self-hosting).
  - rjkennedy98 9y ago
    The main benefits of PCF are not cloud vender lock-in. Where I saw it used, they weren't even on AWS, but using PCF to migrate to microservices. Microservices were written with in Java with Spring Framework, another pivotal product. Pivotal consulting also taught them how to do pair programming, agile, and other "modern" software techniques.
  - ErrantX 9y ago
    one example might be financial services which may get regulated to be multi-cloud. Also DR.
  - chris11 9y ago
    I worked at a place that had recently switched over to microservices in the Cloud from a monolith on premises. Rumors were we were spending a lot of money on our cloud providers. I heard other rumors that pricing got less competitive after awhile because the size of our bills implied that we were locked in. I'd guess that you could get more competitive pricing if you were able to easily switch between cloud providers.
    - exelius 9y ago
      Platforms like this also allow you to choose between using Amazon RDS or a homerolled Postgres DBaaS in the same way. You can make a strategic/tactical decision to implement certain parts of your infrastructure yourself vs outsource the capability entirely. But again, this is really only useful if you’re big enough to have many application groups developing for a bunch of different business units. I have yet to see a good use case for PCF outside enterprise IT departments.
  - sk1ppy 9y ago
    On the contrary, many major companies, especially finservs have multicloud strategies to avoid lock-in or concentration risk (a real concern of regulators). Platforms like pcf and K8s allow for (easier) porting between clouds rather than building directly to cloud provider api's.
  - cavisne 9y ago
    The wildcard here is acquisitions. Large companies make a lot of acquisitions, it can be one of the only ways to grow some companies. Each acquisitions brings its own potentially locked in cloud ecosystem. Large competent software companies like Facebook and Google have still not completely integrated Instagram and Waze respectively for example.
- stickfigure 9y ago
  Only a couple components are Java-based. CloudFoundry started out almost entirely Ruby, but most of it has since been rewritten in Go.
  - exelius 9y ago
    At least when I was working with them last (6-9 months ago) Java had by far the most platform support as a language. I wasn’t talking about the language the PCF code was written in, but rather the development language you use to write services. I realize they support a half dozen plus languages, but Java was by far the best supported in my recollection.
- einrealist 9y ago
  For Cloud Foundry, Java is just one runtime target, provided by build packs. 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.
Pixeleen 9y ago
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 conversation with a gentleman wearing their logo. He seemed visibly taken aback when I asked what his role is. Turned out to be C-level and giving the presentation.
- rjkennedy98 9y ago
  My experience also was that they have a huge snob factor there. I was doing consulting for a database company when I visited their office. In the meeting I was announced as someone when knew our company's product, to which one of the people responded "Oh, I think we already know how <product> works". I wanted to respond, you guys have no f-ing clue how it works, but couldn't for decorum reasons.
  - taurath 9y ago
    Yeah its pretty much crazyland over there - they 100% believe their own kool-aid, and evangelize their processes like its the second coming.
    - ryanong 9y ago
      Ex-Pivot here. The kool-aid was amazing. Would drink again. Best communicators I have ever worked with.
    - RandallBrown 9y ago
      Having worked with Pivots in their SF office and in smaller satellite offices, the Kool-aid isn't nearly as strong away from their main offices. But, I do really like a lot of their processes. Pair programming isn't for everyone, but I think it's a better way of building software. Now that I'm not doing it full time, I constantly miss the benefits of it. Their strict schedule is kinda nice for work life balance, but it also means working with them was a little strange. Our whole team would go out for happy hour at 5, but they would stay until 6, even with almost nobody else in the office.
tpurves 9y ago
Their S1 filing actually provides an easy to read description of their business: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1574135/000104746918002061/a2234898zs-1.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1574135/000104746918... to paraphrase: Besides consulting and software development (Labs), their main product is PCF (Pivotal Cloud Foundry). Basically it helps combine the best bits of cloud centric, automated, containerized tools - without locking you in and letting you be portable across AWS, Google, Azure or private clouds. The big thing here is that there is a massive opportunity of large companies still managing large monolithic apps with slow, expensive horribly inefficient infrastructure and deployment practices. Pivotal helps (especially bigCo.'s) rebuild their whole app infrastructure as well as transform their culture of software development. The biggest thing, according to their case studies, is that both speed of development as well as the ratio of 'ops' headcount to 'developer' headcount can be significantly improved.
- AndrewKemendo 9y ago
  Thanks for this description. So it seems to me that they are consultants who come in to a non-engineering focused company and kind of "train" their engineers to work in a certain way on their own tools and then run a subscription model on those tools. Pretty smart way to do it - and I can see how it would be really aggravating from a power-user/10x engineer perspective.
stagetao 9y ago
They are behind the Spring Framework - https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-framework https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-framework.
sixdimensional 9y ago
I'm surprised nobody mentioned Gemfire and Greenplum (one of their acquisitions) - both rather important data platforms. I also had to do work with Pivotal HD, which was their custom Hadoop distribution. Not sure the status of that these days, they may have nixed it - it's been a while since I worked on that platform.
kumarm 9y ago
In April 2013 VMware, and its parent company EMC Corporation, formally created a joint venture (with GE) called Pivotal Software. All of VMware's application-oriented products, including Spring were transferred to this organization.
mephitix 9y ago
Pivotal also owns RabbitMQ - as of 2013.

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.

by m0meni 9y ago

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.

discodave 9y ago

AFAIK one of the things that they are trying to do with Cloud Foundry is abstract away which cloud you're running on. They are kind-of the OG multi-cloud vendor.

exelius 9y ago

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.

mywittyname 9y ago
I don't foresee companies continuing to pay for the ability to switch cloud providers. Mostly because I doubt the pricing differences between providers will ever be significant enough to justify moving. I also suspect that providers will not keep feature-competitive with one another. It seems like every month, AWS is releasing new tools, and there's no way that other providers are maintaining this pace. My suspicion is each provider will specialize in non-overlapping domains. So unless your company will always be running a lowest-common-denominator site, you'll eventually encounter a vendor lock-in feature.
- exelius 9y ago
  Well, a lot of what PCF does is help you map the services available in AWS / Azure to an internal service catalog as defined by an enterprise architecture group. This is really powerful in the “small enterprise” space ($1 billion - $5 billion) because that’s often where the EA value proposition becomes strong enough to worry about. This is the level PCF plays at; and the level they’re useful, but in my experience Pivotal doesn’t know how enterprise companies develop software. Their scrappy pair-programming Dojos don’t really build systems the way those kinds of companies need to design system requirements. So in my mind, Pivotal’s consulting services are a bunch of startup guys coming in to the enterprise world telling enterprise developers how to build java services. They’re smart and know what they’re doing, but they’re totally out of touch with the kinds of internal controls, reporting metrics and architecture management that larger companies often require.
  - einrealist 9y ago
    I absolutely disagree. Pivotal understands the "needs" of the enterprise world and they prove them wrong at every level. Its that "enterprise world" that needs to change in order to survive or at least to be able to hire new people and to manage the ever growing complexity of enterprise architecture. That's whats referred to as "Digital Transformation". Its just extremely hard for the old "enterprise world" to adopt to change that is inevitable.
- chatmasta 9y ago
  Funny, I see the opposite trend. Technologies like kubernetes enable immutable infrastructure that’s not locked into a single cloud. There’s no reason you couldn’t build a system that regularly and automatically buys the cheapest capacity, sets up a kubernetes cluster, and deploys the latest build to it.
  - mywittyname 9y ago
    Do they make it easy to migrate from tools like AWS EMR, SageMaker, or ElasticTranscoder? It's one thing to be able to migrate VM images or microservices, but in my experience, the big draw to AWS is the features they offer beyond that.
- raywu 9y ago
  It's not always about the price. I've come across government RFP/RFQs that require data to be stored locally (through cloud or self-hosting).
- rjkennedy98 9y ago
  The main benefits of PCF are not cloud vender lock-in. Where I saw it used, they weren't even on AWS, but using PCF to migrate to microservices. Microservices were written with in Java with Spring Framework, another pivotal product. Pivotal consulting also taught them how to do pair programming, agile, and other "modern" software techniques.
- ErrantX 9y ago
  one example might be financial services which may get regulated to be multi-cloud. Also DR.
- chris11 9y ago
  I worked at a place that had recently switched over to microservices in the Cloud from a monolith on premises. Rumors were we were spending a lot of money on our cloud providers. I heard other rumors that pricing got less competitive after awhile because the size of our bills implied that we were locked in. I'd guess that you could get more competitive pricing if you were able to easily switch between cloud providers.
  - exelius 9y ago
    Platforms like this also allow you to choose between using Amazon RDS or a homerolled Postgres DBaaS in the same way. You can make a strategic/tactical decision to implement certain parts of your infrastructure yourself vs outsource the capability entirely. But again, this is really only useful if you’re big enough to have many application groups developing for a bunch of different business units. I have yet to see a good use case for PCF outside enterprise IT departments.
- sk1ppy 9y ago
  On the contrary, many major companies, especially finservs have multicloud strategies to avoid lock-in or concentration risk (a real concern of regulators). Platforms like pcf and K8s allow for (easier) porting between clouds rather than building directly to cloud provider api's.
- cavisne 9y ago
  The wildcard here is acquisitions. Large companies make a lot of acquisitions, it can be one of the only ways to grow some companies. Each acquisitions brings its own potentially locked in cloud ecosystem. Large competent software companies like Facebook and Google have still not completely integrated Instagram and Waze respectively for example.
stickfigure 9y ago
Only a couple components are Java-based. CloudFoundry started out almost entirely Ruby, but most of it has since been rewritten in Go.
- exelius 9y ago
  At least when I was working with them last (6-9 months ago) Java had by far the most platform support as a language. I wasn’t talking about the language the PCF code was written in, but rather the development language you use to write services. I realize they support a half dozen plus languages, but Java was by far the best supported in my recollection.
einrealist 9y ago
For Cloud Foundry, Java is just one runtime target, provided by build packs. 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.

Pixeleen 9y ago

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 conversation with a gentleman wearing their logo. He seemed visibly taken aback when I asked what his role is. Turned out to be C-level and giving the presentation.

rjkennedy98 9y ago
My experience also was that they have a huge snob factor there. I was doing consulting for a database company when I visited their office. In the meeting I was announced as someone when knew our company's product, to which one of the people responded "Oh, I think we already know how <product> works". I wanted to respond, you guys have no f-ing clue how it works, but couldn't for decorum reasons.
- taurath 9y ago
  Yeah its pretty much crazyland over there - they 100% believe their own kool-aid, and evangelize their processes like its the second coming.
  - ryanong 9y ago
    Ex-Pivot here. The kool-aid was amazing. Would drink again. Best communicators I have ever worked with.
  - RandallBrown 9y ago
    Having worked with Pivots in their SF office and in smaller satellite offices, the Kool-aid isn't nearly as strong away from their main offices. But, I do really like a lot of their processes. Pair programming isn't for everyone, but I think it's a better way of building software. Now that I'm not doing it full time, I constantly miss the benefits of it. Their strict schedule is kinda nice for work life balance, but it also means working with them was a little strange. Our whole team would go out for happy hour at 5, but they would stay until 6, even with almost nobody else in the office.

tpurves 9y ago

Their S1 filing actually provides an easy to read description of their business: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1574135/000104746918002061/a2234898zs-1.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1574135/000104746918... to paraphrase: Besides consulting and software development (Labs), their main product is PCF (Pivotal Cloud Foundry). Basically it helps combine the best bits of cloud centric, automated, containerized tools - without locking you in and letting you be portable across AWS, Google, Azure or private clouds. The big thing here is that there is a massive opportunity of large companies still managing large monolithic apps with slow, expensive horribly inefficient infrastructure and deployment practices. Pivotal helps (especially bigCo.'s) rebuild their whole app infrastructure as well as transform their culture of software development. The biggest thing, according to their case studies, is that both speed of development as well as the ratio of 'ops' headcount to 'developer' headcount can be significantly improved.

AndrewKemendo 9y ago
Thanks for this description. So it seems to me that they are consultants who come in to a non-engineering focused company and kind of "train" their engineers to work in a certain way on their own tools and then run a subscription model on those tools. Pretty smart way to do it - and I can see how it would be really aggravating from a power-user/10x engineer perspective.

stagetao 9y ago

They are behind the Spring Framework - https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-framework https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-framework.

sixdimensional 9y ago

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Gemfire and Greenplum (one of their acquisitions) - both rather important data platforms. I also had to do work with Pivotal HD, which was their custom Hadoop distribution. Not sure the status of that these days, they may have nixed it - it's been a while since I worked on that platform.

kumarm 9y ago

In April 2013 VMware, and its parent company EMC Corporation, formally created a joint venture (with GE) called Pivotal Software. All of VMware's application-oriented products, including Spring were transferred to this organization.

mephitix 9y ago

Pivotal also owns RabbitMQ - as of 2013.