The Hague, a city that is said to be the European Capital of peace and justice, human rights and equality. Could there have been a better place for an IT conference, where developers from all over Europe came to meet and learn from their peers, work jointly together and conduct a constructive dialogue with each other than TheHague? Although with 700 attending visitors, fewer participants than in the previous year, it was a lively conference.
It seemed, that the European Cloud Foundry Event in The Hague was more of an exchange platform for the community this time:
“Cloud Foundry is committed to ensuring developers can focus on what matters to them: building applications and writing code. Summit puts developers front and center to share their stories with our European community. Nearly 40 percent of our users report that application development takes less than one day with Cloud Foundry. Developers from across Europe are here to meet with and learn from their peers to maximize their productivity.” Abby Kearns, executive director of Cloud Foundry Foundation, told the audience.
Many member companies presented their latest features during the Summit, for example SUSE, who presented Project Stratos. Stratos is an open source user interface for the Cloud Foundry community, and it has, as of now, officially graduated from an incubating project to a core Cloud Foundry project. Or IBM: IBM gave a real surprise
release at the summit, when they announced that they are working on bringing Cloud Foundry and Red Hat OpenShift together.
Moreover, The Cloud Foundry Foundation released the results from their most recent user survey. While the platform was only used by 24 percent of the companies surveyed in 2017, it is currently used by 45 percent. Especially enterprise companies seem to appreciate the benefits of the platform. “Over half the Fortune 500 are shaping the future of their companies on Cloud Foundry today.” Said Abby Kearns.
Under the roof of “justice and peace” the topic of diversity, equality and justice in gender also played a major role. 25% of the speakers and 17% of the attendees were women.
As in previous events, a Diversity Luncheon was held again, with several talks and discussions. Especially impressive was the presentation on ungendered feedback, held by Nikita Rathi and Katrina Bakas. Both women showed what an impact feedback on employees has, and what good feed- back should be like: “Feedback is key – at best it helps us grow, lets us know where we thrive, and makes us better teammates. At worst, it can stop careers in their tracks,” Rathi and Bakas told the audience. They also pointed out that women were 1.4 times more likely to receive critical subjective feedback as “opposed to either positive feedback or critical objective feedback that are tied to outcomes”.
To sum up: The Cloud Foundry Summit managed to show the audience the relevance of Open Source technologies such as Cloud Foundry for the digital transformation of companies worldwide. It also showed the relevance of working together in the community, exchanging experience. Moreover, it focused on including female developers and tried to reduce gender bias in the ecosystem.
Cloudical is definitely looking for- ward to the next CF Summit in 2020.
Author:
Julia Hahn / Cloudical Deutschland GmbH