Dan Jones and Dan Young are co-founders of Engineer Better. It is a UK-based consultancy that has been going for over two years. Engineer Better focused on Cloud Foundry as an area of expertise. The Jones and Young talked with Enterprise Times about what they are seeing as customer move to adopt Cloud Foundry and CI/CD.
The company focus is on helping customers get the most of the technology they have chosen to adopt. There has been a lot of focus on continuous integration and continuous delivery. Jones and Young talk about some of the very different interpretations by companies as to what CI/CD means.
Much of the focus on Cloud Foundry tends to be around the distributions and very large customers. They have plenty of time and people to invest in making it work. ET asked how smaller companies were managing their engagement with Cloud Foundry. Dan Jones said: “There is definitely a challenge with Cloud Foundry when it comes to the operator persona. To get Cloud Foundry up and running for yourself if a non trivial exercise. The deployment tool Bosh is very, very powerful and there is nothing out there that does all the things that it does. However, it has an exceptionally steep learning curve. I’ve referred to it as a learning cliff.”
“This challenge with Cloud Foundry has driven many smaller organisations to work with the distributions” according to Dan Young. They are happy to let someone else do all the configuration and other work. One of the benefits of hosted Cloud Foundry is that developers can save significant sums of money and time when building apps.
One of the major challenges that Jones sees across organisations is that: “The structure of the enterprise hasn’t changed in over a hundred years. We are living with a Taylorist structure of the organisation. We separate thinkers from doers. We have architects, developers and managers. Everyone has different needs and there is no one message to get them all to align to an organisational outcome.” All of this is fertile ground for the rise of new platforms like Kubernetes because, according to Jones: “it serves the needs of one particular silo inside the organisation.”
To hear what else Jones and Young had to say, listen to the podcast
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