The Cloudcast: Application Automation and Enterprise PaaS

The Cloudcast (.net) #49 - Application Automation and Enterprise PaaS (41:52)

Date: August 9, 2012
Guest: Brett Adam (@bpjadam) - CTO / VP Engineering @ rPath

Description: Aaron and Brian talk with Brett Adam (@bpjadam), CTO / VP Engineering @ rPath, about the evolution of Application deployment and PaaS for the Enterprise..

Good webinar on various approach to IT Automation - http://www.rpath.com/it-automation/index.php#register

rPath - Automation goes beyond “automating the runbook”, but figuring out what the automation should be. Figure out the optimal approach. Needed because of such rapid change.

rPath - Put the right software, on the right server, at the right time, given all the changes taking place within IT. Velocity challenges.

Topic 1 - Where is the right place for automation to exist within IT organizations? Which groups should have the skills, tools and policies to do automation?

Topic 2 - Between the breadth of “automation” vendors, there seems to be a wide variety of approaches and scopes to automation (Data Center, Applications, VMs, etc.) . Can you talk about some of the fundamental differences between something like BMC vs. Puppet vs. where rPath fits?

Topic 3 - Rodrigo Flores (@rfflores, Cisco) wrote an interesting article saying that PaaS is begin to bifurcate between “Silicon Valley style PaaS” (eg. CloudFoundry, Heroku, etc.) and “Enterprise PaaS”. Are you seeing similar separate as you talk to customers?

Topic 4 - Where does it make sense to look at “complete tools” vs. chaining together of different types of tools- rPath integration with Puppet Labs - http://www.rpath.com/solutions/rpath-and-puppet.php

Topic 4 - Let’s talk about “Golden Images” vs. “Snowflakes”.

Topic 5 - In the “IT Automation Unplugged” webinar, you brought up the idea that automation is  drawing from principles used in factory automation. I’ve called this “21st Century Bits Factory”. Are you seeing IT organizations beginning to understand this concept?

rPath is also launching something called the Enterprise Cloud Adoption Framework (ECAF) in partnership with Cisco at VMworld 2012. It has a strong relationship the industrialization concept and PaaS in particular. More info @ http://www.rpath.com/ecaf/