Who is sam ramji

Childers echoed this and added that the companies that have adopted Cloud Foundry now often find themselves struggling to find the talent necessary to operate their platforms and write applications for them. The foundation plans to soon launch a certification program to help ease this issue. Childers also noted that the project needs to ensure that its tools fit into the complex IT setups that many of these enterprises already operate today.

And keep trying to put their thoughts into sort of useful, purposeful form. I think the other thing, though, is you want to be able to make this knowledge yours. So make sure you've identified two or three people in the company who will make it part of their job to really be looking at new stuff. Make it part of the job of some of the management and make sure that you enable and encourage that by having people come present to you.

Ramji: Yes, if you have outsourced all your development, you've communicated that it's overhead that has cost reduction impact. If you want to reverse that course, you need to be genuinely curious about developers, things that developers are curious to explore. And you can demonstrate that by having this process light up by questions.

During my time at Microsoft, as the Linux and open source team grew and tried to understand our mission and how we can help Microsoft succeed, we learned that Bill had a series of quarterly demos, and it was a huge honor to sit, to spend half an hour with Bill to demonstrate what you were building, or even for us, what we hadn't built, but we were showcasing things from the open source community.

Every company has a culture of rewards. What are the social rewards that you can pay to your development teams, to your IT Ops teams to get them to come out and show you what they're doing. Hardy: You've recently been talking about something called open cloud. How do you describe that? Ramji: We're really thinking about three things — friendliness to open source.

We're thinking about open access, right — open to bring things into this cloud that you want to put there, open to taking things out of this cloud when you want to move them out, which could include your whole estate. And then finally, open ecosystem. And this is where we have an opportunity to transform businesses and IT as an industry. If the cloud ecosystems evolve in an open and operable and portable way, it forms a single large economy that can continue to grow, again, based on positive sum games.

Hardy : You are in charge of the products that go into Google Cloud that enable software developers to build great products for their companies. Ramji : Yeah, that's right. So, one of the things that inspires me about Google and what our standing is, what we can offer to the world is we've learned this the hard way, right? There's 1, steps from a developer needing to write code, to something scaling in production for the nth release.

We've had to beat our head on each one in order to make our seven different, billion-user businesses successful. Everybody knows Google is the most extraordinary digital business model in the world. Hardy : Yeah, we have all this fantastic learning, but we do have to tune it up and make it coherent in a new way.

Ramji: We do. What we've learned is unifying these disciplines and building a coherent system where that workflow actually flows — that's the prize. Ramji : If you are an application developer, or you're in IT operations, you care about the packaging, standardization, and scale of your workload. For a long time, that was physical servers and that was the old days, very difficult, very complicated.

Then it became virtual servers. Now, we've bridged into a new abstraction layer called containers. Containers are a wonderful mechanism for packaging an application or a workload. It's specifies: Here's the application, here are the core dependencies. Hardy : And by keeping it constrained in just the thing you want to do. Hardy: You can deploy and manage essentially at any point in the globe. Ramji: One of the things that makes computing so difficult is for any application you want to build and deploy, tends to have cascading dependencies.

Imagining dependencies like roots, right; they keep you stuck in place. Containers clip the roots back down at the pot, and you say, "Well, we can just move this potted plant anywhere we need. So, this is something that's bringing in this era of elasticity. Now, given our expertise there and our contribution to Linux, we've also built a great amount of capability and containers in Google and in Google Cloud.

In fact, we created the number one container management project in the world called Kubernetes. So, Kubernetes is open source, and it's proliferating madly everywhere. It's on premises, it's in people's data centers, it's multiple clouds. Hardy: Open source is smart strategy, because it puts you in a lot of places and a lot of people pulled on, so it has a kind of appeal of a standard.

Ramji: Exactly right. Open source is standardization for the software development community. Industrialization of the construction industry occurred when you started to standardize the tooling you were using. Did you — could you talk about a 2x4? Or did everybody have to mill their own planks? Once you have 2x4s, you have an open supply and you can start to say, well, now we have standardized languages and patterns about which we can build a house. Software developers are really cognitive construction workers, right?

They're cognitive carpenters. The more that they can standardize the tools that they're using, and modify them a bit to meet their own needs, the better of a house they can build, the better apps they can build.

Sometimes we talk about open source and a CIO says, "Oh, my God, if I use open source does that mean that all the software I have in my company has to be given away? Ramji: No, right? He drove many of Microsoft's contributions to open source and its shift to embrace open source technologies like PHP.

Ramji has built large-scale enterprise and Web-scale applications, leading the Ofoto engineering team through its acquisition by Kodak. His other experience includes leading engineering teams to build large-scale applications on open source software, as well as hands-on development of client, client-server and distributed applications on Unix, Windows and Macintosh at prior companies.