The second annual SpringOne Platform Conference has kicked off in San Francisco, from Dec 4 to 7, 2017.
This is a four-day (first day is training) no-nonsense event with roughly 10 parallel tracks, celebrity speakers, food, drink, and lots of technology.
The conference is clearly growing; the first one in 2016 had roughly 1600 attendees in Las Vegas, but this year in San Francisco it is very nearly at 3000. In addition, the keynotes are broadcast to millions of Spring developers around the world.
In the keynote, Onsi Fakhouri, Pivotal Sr. VP Head of R&D for cloud, declared their mission to transform enterprises.
“We have a vision that we are going to help the largest companies in the world standardize on CloudFoundry.” Pivotal clearly takes this responsibility seriously, and in talks by Spring Framework lead Juergen Hoeller, Pivotal marketing manager Pieter Humphrey, and others, the message was clear that the community is their primary driver and defines their direction.
The talks this year mostly clustered around the following technologies:
- Spring Framework 5.0
- Pivotal CloudFoundry
- Project Reactor
- WebFlux
- Spring Cloud
- Spring Boot
- And a lot on DevOps and process.
A large portion of the speakers are Pivotal staff; usually project leads and committers. The talks are highly curated, and very professional. In addition, there are open space gatherings, where topics are selected for a short circle discussion.
We will publish a follow up on major announcements, but the most important was the announcement of the release of Pivotal CloudFoundry 2.0 and the rebranding of the Elastic Runtime as Pivotal Application Service, with a wealth of new features and support for the full DevOps/Cloud pipeline.
Says Fakhouri:
One unifying principal we have found is learning. When we look at the world, reality is really complicated, and so we tend to simplify, locating ourselves in that reality, planning to achieve our goals. But reality is not simple, we will often be frustrated, things will take longer than we would have liked. We are in the midst of the “fog of war” and we don’t even know where we are going. We think we know, but when we finally get to a point where we think we arrived, we might look and realize we were wrong.
Included among the speakers are industry celebrities like Juergen Hoeller (Spring Framework lead), Eric Brewer (of CAP theorem fame), Erich Gamma (Gang of Four author, who said when he joined Microsoft he never imagined he’d ever be speaking at a Java conference again), and many other engineers from Pivotal, Industry, etc.