PKS in 12 minutes

PKS through VMWare also enables persistent storage, not just stateless as Kubernetes is designed for and I believe answers the question that SW has about Big Data (also, there are customers now who use Pivotal precisely to run Big Data in their organizations - but that is another topic).

This video, from a VMWare product manager, done in a very charming manner, illustrates for “dummies” like us what all this abstraction is, and why one wants to use PKS. It will hit home the point that Kubernetes are great, but try deploying Kubernetes at scale within an enterprise and handle all the infrastructure yourself. Imagine thousands and thousands of K8s and managing all the infrastructure.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2g1KE5zdbRs

We have done a lot of talking and fretting. This 12 minute video, with the product manager (with great talent I might add) using markers on glass to simply and concisely lay out for us what this is all about. If you have any interest in Pivotal I highly recommend watching this 12 minute video. I also am impressed at the quality of this product manager.

Report back here with any comments or questions. Things are not so complex as they seem with Pivotal. Do you want to produce applications and just deliver them and have things go auto-magic in the background, or do you want to control the infrastructure and background manually for all your applications to work. That is the “auto-magic” that Pivotal is the best in the world at bringing. Of course it is not all or nothing there is a spectrum of product choices customers can make with third party plug-ins, but only Pivotal does it as one service so it just works (so does Red Hat, but Red Hat works a bit differently, and abstracts less away - but that is a whole other topic as well) and no one gets 100% of the market. The market you want is the most lucrative.

Anyways, I do highly recommend the 12 minutes this video takes. It will lay it out for you.

Tinker

24 Likes

Pivotal is a cloud solution for me and other application and enterprise architects. It is like a machine that automatically builds a cloud application for me. I give it the design, and the latest version of the code. I tell it to build it on AWS, or Azure, or Google, or on my own machines. 10 minutes later - it is done, tested, verified, and running. I don’t even need to tell it - it checks my systems, and knows when I’m ready for a build, knows where I want it, and builds it for me. It speeds up my productivity immensely, and let’s me avoid any sort of vendor lock-in - and I no longer even need to know how to spell “server”… It is just a matter of enterprises expanding it to all their IT, as they move to the cloud, maximize the productivity of their developers, automate their processes, and avoid vendor lock-in.

This is from Saul taking it from SW. Take the things from the video and ask will just using Kubernetes without a higher level management system just make it work as bolded above?

But each enterprise is free to choose. The largest enterprises are choosing to do as bolded as that is a no-brainer.

We will see at earnings how many more companies choose to use Pivotal to obtain this functionality. Once in the organization we have seen what happens with the product. It becomes systematized.

Anyways, that is the bull case for Pivotal. VMWare creates the capability of persistent storage in an otherwise stateless container.

Bear case is only a very few organizations (mostly the 300 some already Pivotal customers) will want the same advantages, that VMWare has a horrible go to market strategy with its 500,000 customers and thus will either fail or back stab Pivotal, that Red Hat will somehow be successful whereas Pivotal not, and that Google will create more software to better abstract away the complexities over time.

Of these, only the very latter seems correct. And here, that is not likely to be the case as Google does not want cloud agnostic. Kubernetes is a device for Google to obtain access into large enterprises and move more workloads to Google Cloud, it is not a device to enable Google to selflessly move workloads for free to everyone else.

Enough for me. There really is nothing more that we will know until earnings. The first earnings call was somewhat revealing and lucrative. The second one should be more than somewhat revealing. Look at the new logo numbers. That should answer better this persistent concern that Pivotal’s market is not that interested in the product and that it will limited to the likes of Boeing, Ford, Home Depot, Citibank, and their incompetent ilk as all other large enterprises have much more skilled and coordinated software development teams.

Btw/ Mongo, has a similar protocol to Pivotal called Stitch. However, Stitch can only go so far in abstracting development in regard to MongoDB, thus why Pivotal and MongoDB are such good partners together. Just went through a 20 minute interview between Pivotal and MongoDB.

Tinker

13 Likes

Well, the first thing I noticed about this video was how did they make it? It appears that the guy is standing behind a piece of glass while writing and diagramming pieces and parts and relationships of PKS. In order to do that, he would have to write everything backwards in order for it to be forwards for us to read it. Further, he appears to be writing with his left hand, but clearly his wedding ring and watch are on his left hand so he’s writing with his right hand.

How’d they do that? And as an aside, I’m glad he’s wearing a black shirt rather than an Hawaiian shirt.

But, as for content, a lot of techtalk. He only briefly alludes to why anyone might be interested in PKS from a business perspective. I get it. The presentation is intended to simplify the technology down to a few multi-colored boxes and lines so most people can understand it. And he occasionally uses terms like “automation” and “automagically” which sort of imply that there is a business case. But if I were the guy making the buy/not buy decision, this video would be a wasted 12 minutes. And I understand what he’s saying better than a lot of senior managers might.

4 Likes

How’d they do that?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Adm2raocQZ4

I have to admit that I was confused by thinking he was using his left hand.

Turns out there is a mirror involved :slight_smile:

1 Like

This is very easily done in post production as well. Shoot it as normal and just flip the image.