Step into the unusual Pivotal behind Spring

Video version:

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1PT41157XB/?aid=469863992&cid=739764384&page=1

introduction

Spring is the enterprise Java open source development framework used and loved by millions of developers, who is behind it? When tech giants deploy big data, cloud computing and industrial Internet, who will step up and take on the important responsibility? When the virtualization giant VMWare is moving towards cloud native, who has taken on the task of developing the VMWare Tanzu product line?

Hello everyone! I am Koala. Pivotal, which has gathered technology, talents and capital from birth, has a noble birth and extraordinary mission; Pivotal, born with open source blood, has shaped a unique development culture with its leading technical capabilities, and has created many praised by developers. open source project.

Today, we will walk into the extraordinary Pivotal with you.

From Spring to Pivotal

Spring, the most well-known open source project in the Pivotal system today, did not start with Pivotal.

Released in 2003, the Java open source framework Spring has a legendary origin. Its creator, Rod Johnson, is not only a computer scientist who has published the classic reference book of J2EE, but also a doctor of musicology.

Spring is a lightweight development framework positioned to replace EJB and maintained in an open source form. Developers can use it to write performant, easy-to-test, and reusable code. Spring's open source properties have brought together countless contributors from all over the world, who have jointly created an increasingly powerful Spring ecosystem; and adhering to the neutral Spring, advocating the principle of not binding users and business code not relying on Spring, users can always Migrating from Spring to other frameworks. All these made Spring the most popular enterprise Java application development framework at the time.

With the rise of the cloud, in order to expand into new areas, since 2008, SpringSource, the company behind Spring, has started the acquisition of 3 open source projects.

In January 2008, through the acquisition of Covalent Technologies, it gained the dominance of the open source Web application server Apache Tomcat and the HTTP protocol. Tomcat is deployed in more than 60% of organizations worldwide running Java applications. At the time, SpringSource was also a major contributor and maintainer of Tomcat, responsible for over 95% of bug fixes.
In November 2008, it acquired the open source application programming language Groovy and the open source Web application development framework Grails through the acquisition of G2One.

In May 2009, SpringSource merged with Hyperic, an open source system monitoring vendor. With more than 3,500 Hyperic application monitoring and management tools deployed worldwide, Hyperic was recognized as one of the leading open source products of its time.
As Spring's products become more modern and richer, by 2009, Spring was used by approximately 2 million developers worldwide; most of the Global 2000 companies were its customers. With the increase in value, SpringSource at this time has also changed from the initiator of the acquisition to the target of the acquisition.

In August 2009, virtualization giant VMWare announced the acquisition of SpringSource, saying that SpringSource's modern application platform would become an integral part of VMWare's cloud infrastructure strategy. As a global leader in virtualization solutions, VMWare hopes to combine SpringSource's technology to develop innovative PaaS solutions that enable enterprise users to more efficiently build, run and manage applications in internal and external cloud architectures.

Regarding the milestone event of being acquired by VMWare, SpringSource said on its official website that this will open the second chapter of Spring.

Soon, the second chapter of Spring Source begins. A week later, under the leadership of VMWare, SpringSource announced the acquisition of the open source framework Cloud Foundry, and thus launched a new cloud platform SpringSource Cloud Foundry. A new enterprise Java cloud offering that enables developers to deploy and manage Spring, Grails, and Java applications in public cloud environments; a self-service, pay-as-you-go, public Platform for cloud deployment. This platform unifies Java's entire build, run, and manage application lifecycle.

With the acquisition of Cloud Foundry, in April 2010, SpringSource also acquired the open source message queue component RabbitMQ and the open source cache component Redis. In response to these two acquisitions, VMWare CEO Paul Maritz said that they do not want to get involved in the database itself, but enter the cloud computing application business through these middleware projects that have become the de facto standard.

A month later, SpringSource acquired Gemstone, a distributed in-memory database, and gained its main product, GemFire, an in-memory data grid, which will add high-performance storage to cloud applications with high real-time requirements.

When the time came to July 2012, Spring founder Dr. Rod Johnson announced his departure. This also announced that Spring will usher in a new master, entering the third chapter.

At the end of 2012, VMWare and the technology giant EMC that controlled it jointly launched the Pivotal Initiative, which later became Pivotal Software. The two parties have injected big data and cloud computing assets into Pivotal, including SpringSource.

In March of the following year, the industrial giant GE invested in cash again. As a result, Pivotal became the carrier for the giants to deploy cloud computing and big data, and look forward to the industrial Internet.

The mission of Pivotal is evident in the hard-core assets injected by shareholders. In addition to SpringSource from VMWare, there are EMC's big data component Greenplum and Pivotal Labs, which has excellent developer resources.

In the face of yet another milestone, the Spring team once again blogged that Spring is part of Pivotal and that Spring will form the strategic core of Pivotal together with Pivotal HD and Cloud Foundry.

Loading other gear into the Pivotal

In Pivotal's arsenal, not only Spring, but also EMC-infused powerhouse Greenplum and Pivotal Labs.

Greenplum is not self-developed by EMC, but acquired through acquisition. In 2010, the year the acquisition was initiated, surveys indicated that the volume of cloud data was increasing at a 44-fold annual rate, and the market required new architectures and tools to handle big data.

Greenplum, known as a disruptive data warehouse technology provider, is a key promoter of "big data" cloudification and self-service analysis.

Not only a facilitator, Greenplum is also regarded by the industry as a visionary leader. It uses a share nothing massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture, using a virtualized x86 infrastructure for analytical processing. Greenplum can provide 10 to 100 times higher performance than traditional databases at a lower cost. EMC believes that the combination of Greenplum's market-leading technology and EMC's virtualized private cloud infrastructure will provide customers at the time with the best solution for the "big data" of the future. "

As for Pivotal Labs injected by EMC, it has the most valuable technical and developer resources. It provides a large number of professional developers to Pivotal. These developer resources of Pivotal will play a key role in technological evolution and enterprise transformation in all subsequent stages.

Setting up the Pivotal background

So, what was the state of the industry when Pivotal was founded? What do tech and industrial giants expect from it?

At the time, cloud services had more than doubled. Among the competitors, Amazon's AWS is already the leader and pioneer in cloud services; Microsoft has built Azure into a full-featured cloud platform; and OpenStack, an open source cloud software backed by IBM and Red Hat, among others. Although VMware's virtualization software is nearly ubiquitous in enterprise private data centers, the private cloud in which it resides has lagged behind the public cloud in innovation, and more developers are moving to the public cloud with more managed services. VMware urgently needs to solidify its cloud strategy.

And EMC also has a dream, that is, it hopes that the brilliant record that EMC has achieved after acquiring VMWare can be reproduced in Pivotal. To this end, EMC also appointed then VMware CEO, Paul Maritz as Pivotal's first CEO.
As for industrial giants like GE investing in Pivotal, it was because GE was launching the Industrial Internet at the time, and GE believed that Pivotal had the best technology in town, would help GE accelerate innovation and delivery, and would bring about a productivity revolution.

Pivotal after its establishment

After its establishment, Pivotal takes big data, PaaS cloud platform and agile development as its three core technical directions. Although from a distinguished background, Pivotal has entered an already crowded track, competing on the same stage with super players such as IBM, SAP, AWS, and inheriting high-quality assets and excellent developers. How will Pivotal build a competitive product? ?

In November 2013, Pivotal first released the Pivotal One. At the time, Pivotal One was billed as the world's first next-generation multi-cloud enterprise PaaS platform. As a comprehensive integration platform, it includes Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Cloud Foundry's enterprise distribution, and a new set of applications and data services that run on top of Pivotal CF. These services support a wide range of public and private cloud environments.

While launching the enterprise-level PaaS platform, Pivotal also closely follows the trend of the times for the optimization and evolution of Spring series products.

In 2013, Pivotal released the blockbuster project Spring Boot. Spring Boot is a new framework provided by the Pivotal team, designed to simplify the initial setup and development of Spring applications. This has made Spring Boot a leader in applied agile development. After more than ten years of evolution, Spring will inevitably become large, complex and bloated. Spring Boot, by adopting the concept of convention-first configuration, encapsulates the complexity, shielding users from many implementation details, and returning Spring to a light-weight Quantify this original intention.

Spring Cloud, released in 2015, reflects Pivotal's leading strength in microservice technology. Spring Cloud is a set of microservice solutions based on Spring Boot, which provides developers with a series of components. After the concept of microservices was proposed in 2014, streaming media giant Netflix has become a model in the industry for successfully implementing a large-scale production-level microservice architecture. And it was Pivotal who was advising Netflix at the time. As a result, Pivotal incorporated Netflix's full suite of components, Netflix OSS, into Spring Cloud, bringing Spring back to the top spot as a Java application development framework in the cloud era.

In addition, Pivotal commercializes the database management system software Pivotal Greenplum Database. After that, Pivotal open-sourced its core engine and continued development by the Greenplum Database open source community and Pivotal.

Founded more than three years ago, with the agility of startups, high-quality technology and developer assets, and the support of technology giants, Pivotal has quickly occupied the global high-end big data and cloud computing market.

On April 20, 2018, Pivotal went public.

VMWare acquires Pivotal

However, Pivotal, which was listed soon, was quickly rejected by the capital market. In June 2019, Pivotal shares fell 42% on the day following the release of a "catastrophic" quarterly report. even sued by investors.

Four months later, on August 22, VMWare announced the acquisition of Pivotal, replacing EMC as the controlling shareholder of Pivotal. After the acquisition, Pivotal was delisted from the NYSE; Pivotal's 3,000-person development team entered the VMWare Tanzu development department as a whole.

Following the acquisition, VMWare no longer released products under the Pivotal name. However, when we look at VMWare Tanzu's rich product line, we still see traces of Pivotal. What is the value of Pivotal to VMWare? In the Tanzu system, which well-known open source projects does Pivotal play a role in?

A week after announcing the acquisition, CEO Pat Gelsinger spoke specifically about the role of Pivotal's developer resources at the 2019 VMWorld conference, where VMware Tanzu was unveiled. He said, "Taking Tanzu as an example, the development of K8s has put forward new requirements for our developers, and Pivotal is a team with extraordinary capabilities in this regard, they just haven't reached the center of the K8s stage, we will use them to use On the edge." VMWare treats Pivotal like a jewel, as the headline of this report titled "Pivotal's Power: Why VMware Celebrates Its Big Deal".

Why did VMWare urgently need to build Tanzu? Although VMWare began to embrace Docker as early as 2014, integrating container and virtual machine technologies, and investing in the development of K8s since 2016, both enterprise customers and the market still believe that VMWare's attitude towards K8s is not clear enough. It was not until VMWare decided to completely transform vSphere and launch a new K8s product line, Tanzu, that it clearly showed its attitude of fully embracing K8s, and also marked VMware's transformation from a pure virtualization vendor to a cloud native vendor.

Pivotal, along with VMWare's previous acquisitions of Bitnami and Heptio, formed the combined fleet to build VMWare Tanzu. And the role of the super battleship Pivotal can also be confirmed from the evaluation of the two founders of Heptio, Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie.

Joe and Craig, as two of the three founders of K8s, served as chief engineer and VMware R&D VP respectively after VMware acquired Heptio. In their words, Pivotal is an important part of Tanzu's story, not just delivering technology, but also providing professional-level support and service.

Today, among the six open source sections of Tanzu, in addition to the aforementioned projects from Pivotal, there are cloud native image packaging tool Buildpacks, container image warehouse Harbor, k8s ingress controller Contour, K8s disaster recovery tool Velero, Visualization tool Octant, and network solution Antrea, etc.

Ending

The Pivotal brand was first seen in Pivotal Labs, founded in 1989 by Rob Mee. At the time, it was seen as a shaper of Silicon Valley's software development culture. More than 30 years later, Pivotal remains a technology trendsetter. Its open source products are well known to developers, and its open source influence is praised by developers.

Although Pivotal has encountered setbacks on the road to commercialization, it has been revived under the Tanzu system. After reading this issue, do you have a new understanding of the geeky Pivotal in front of the screen? Feel free to share your views in the comments section.