What To Expect At The “In The Wild” Track : Cloud Foundry Summit 2021

This blog post is a summary on what to expect at the Cloud Foundry Summit 2021, in particular the “In The Wild” track. The talks contain a trove of user stories shared by practitioners from the Cloud Foundry community.

Technology, much like a river, carves out a unique path for itself. It gushes, it cascades, it meanders, and ultimately creates so much utility around it. In the same way, we have seen and observed Cloud Foundry bring a lot of benefit to those who have adopted it.

For the many hundreds of thousands of Cloud Foundry users, the story of putting it to work at their organizations has been filled with interesting challenges, intriguing solutions, and intricate lessons. We invited members from the community to come forward and share their experience about their implementations. In each of the sessions belonging to this track, there are interesting takeaways for software engineering teams of all kinds.

For those attendees who are new to the community (but may be very experienced with technology), we have two sessions that are sure to be of tremendous value. Interestingly, both speakers are from anynines, a technology consulting firm that specializes in modern tech such as Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry.

Martin Valencia Florence shares personal experience about bringing engineers from diverse backgrounds on board the Cloud Foundry platform.
Julian Fischer explores decision-making paths for technologists who are faced with the job of determining the course of their operating domain – infrastructure, applications, and all that comes in between.

Both speakers are steeped in years of Cloud Foundry experience and are sure to demonstrate their understanding of the technology to the fullest.

Security, scalability, and supporting migrations are among the top three concerns for DevOps practitioners who work with cloud technologies. Together, these three areas represent a crucial aspect of making any particular tool work for software engineering teams. The talks by:

Neville and Ian about running applications
Jovan about operating at scale
Eric touching upon security paradigms
Stacy and Tom exploring migrations

are full of lessons gleaned from the real-world when working with Cloud Foundry. They will help mitigate concerns that engineering teams are certain to have about working with the Cloud Foundry platform.

The origins of Cloud Foundry lay in simplifying the deployment experience when using virtual machines. Today, the paradigms about simplification remain but the infrastructure “plane” has evolved into Kubernetes. Over the course of this evolution, several implementations demonstrated impressive technical expertise and Richard and Andrew from IBM share their replatforming experience.

Ignoring the areas of business, technology, and culture implies inviting risk through the front door. Michael from VMware demonstrates the use of metrics that help companies improve their ability to build and run software. The metrics, built from years of working with cloud applications, span three different sectors of a software organization and will help teams work with more maturity and efficacy.

We strongly believe that this track at the Cloud Foundry Summit will provide answers to several pertinent issues that software engineering teams have today, and may have in the future. Especially, when it comes to complex technical projects such as Cloud Foundry, empiricism and experiential learning has no substitute.

Special thanks to Mark Fynes of VMware and James Hunt from Stark & Wayne, for being the co-chairs and selecting all the talks for the “In The Wild” track.

We invite you to register right away for the Summit. We are currently operating in a virtual format, like so many other tech events. We believe that the format will allow us to best meet the needs of our globally diverse community. Reach out to us on events@cloudfoundry.org with any questions you may have.

A full list of the talks belonging to the “In the Wild” track follows:

Wednesday, July 21