Episode Details

This conversation covers:

• An average workday for Thomas as senior systems engineer at Systematic.
• How Systematic uses cross-functional collaboration to solve problems and produce high quality software.
• How security and data privacy relate to cloud-native technologies, and the challenges they present. 
• Systematic’s journey to cloud native, and why the company decided it was a good idea. 
• Why it’s important to consider the hidden costs and complexities of cloud-native before migrating.
• What makes an application appropriate for the cloud, and some tips to help with making that decision.
• The biggest surprises that Thomas has encountered when  moving applications to cloud-native technology. 
• Thomas’s new book, Cloud Native Spring in Action, which is about designing and developing cloud-native applications using Spring Boot, Kubernetes, and other cloud-native technologies. Thomas also talks about who would benefit from his book.
• Thomas’s background and experience using cloud-native technology.
• The biggest misconceptions about cloud-native, according to Thomas.

Links

• Systematic
• Cloud Native Spring in Action book
• Thomas Vitale personal website
• Follow Thomas on Twitter
• Connect with Thomas on LinkedIn

Transcript
Emily: Hi everyone. I’m Emily Omier, your host, and my day job is helping companies position themselves in the cloud-native ecosystem so that their product’s value is obvious to end-users. I started this podcast because organizations embark on the cloud naive journey for business reasons, but in general, the industry doesn’t talk about them. Instead, we talk a lot about technical reasons. I’m hoping that with this podcast, we focus more on the business goals and business motivations that lead organizations to adopt cloud-native and Kubernetes. I hope you’ll join me.

Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. I'm your host, Emily Omier, and today I'm chatting with Thomas Vitale. Thomas, thanks so much for joining us.

Thomas: Hi, Emily. And thanks for having me on this podcast.

Emily: Of course. I just like to start by asking everyone to introduce themselves. So, Thomas, can you tell us a little bit about what you do and where you work, and how you actually spend your day?

Thomas: Yes, I work as a senior systems engineer at Systematic. That is a Danish company, where I design and develop software solutions in the healthcare sector. And I really like working with cloud-native technologies and, in particular, with Java frameworks, and with Kubernetes, and Docker. I'm particularly passionate about application security and data privacy. These are the two main things that I've been doing, also, in Systematic.

Emily: And can you tell me a little bit about what a normal workday looks like for you?

Thomas: That's a very interesting question. So, in my daily work, I work on features for our set of applications that are used in the healthcare sector. And I participate in requirements elicitation and goal clarification for all new features and new set of functionality that we'd like to introduce in our application. And I'm also involved in the deployment part, so I work on the full value stream, we could say. So, from the early design and development, and then deploying the result in production.

Emily: And to what extent, at Systematic, do you have a division between application developers and platform engin