I work at Pivotal Software.  I was asked recently about Pivotal’s approach to “operational excellence.”  The answer has a lot to do with just how “cloud native” Pivotal is.

Pivotal’s heart and soul rest in the practices of Lean and Agile methodologies and especially Extreme Programming. The platforms that Pivotal has helped build are platforms focused on increasing developer productivity and shortening software release cycles.  Operational success is measured on the achieved outcomes like improved software release velocity with fewer bugs, and not as much on operations-specific metrics like reductions in trouble tickets.  These methods are how PCF is developed.  These methods form the principals of how we operate and customize PCF platform deployments for our customers as well.

Here is some background on Agile at Pivotal:  https://pivotal.io/agile
Some industry context:  https://www.agilealliance.org/glossary/xp/

One of the primary tools that Lean contributes is the Value Stream Assessment.  This is a strategic level planning tool that reveals the time and effort consumed at each stage of business process.  It reveals how much idle time, wasted time, and real effort go into delivering an outcome.  Pivotal teams have done many VSA’s over the years that show how automation of the infrastructure deployment tasks can improve developer’s release productivity.  If developers are not waiting on other teams, when they can self-serve the infrastructure they require, and it is immediately available to them, their productivity improves dramatically.

For a whitepaper on Value Stream Assessments, read: https://content.pivotal.io/white-papers/crossing-the-value-stream-improving-development-with-pivotal-and-cloud-foundry

The industry has coined a term for the practice of Developers who also Operate their own software in conjunction with embedded Operators on the development team – DevOps.  These small teams of skilled developer + operators have created for the industry Cloud Native application and infrastructure patterns that unlock unprecedented productivity gains in the software development life cycle.

For an e-book on DevOps and Cloud Native Patterns, read:  https://content.pivotal.io/ebooks/crafting-your-cloud-native-strategy

Operational excellence at Pivotal looks more like a DevOps team of operators-who-can-code leveraging Lean and Agile methods (not highly planned waterfall projects) to build a high velocity, stable, secure, and efficient platform that is itself treated like a product.  There is a brand associated with the product, and it is i over time to meet the specific use cases that emerge in their organization.  These teams work with the open source community to contribute or at least inform patterns of capabilities that then get folded into the mainstream platform code base.

Read more about the Pivotal Platform here:  https://pivotal.io/platform

Collection of technical guides on how to use Pivotal Cloud Foundry to build world class applications:  https://content.pivotal.io/build

Pivotal’s collection of whitepapers on various topics:  https://content.pivotal.io/white-papers