mreider/PCF to Azure, Google, Photon

## PCF to Azure, Google, Photon
TL;DR: We are not going to ship the "split release" of Ops Manager. We are going to ship Ops Manager for Azure, GCP, and Photon separately, and work on UX for BOSH so we can support BOSH as an official Pivotal product.

As you may know, we had this plan to split BOSH out of Ops Manager to ship on Azure, GCP, and Photon.

A couple of months ago I started arguing that this was unnecessary. This has resulted in a change of plan.

My opinion was that Pivotal should productize BOSH, add some usability features, provide BOSH support via Zendesk, and invest in documentation and branding for BOSH. At the same time, I felt it was important to shift Ops Manager into something of a read-only dashboard for BOSH deployments.

My views stem from constant customer feedback about how Ops Manager misses the mark. Ops Manager is hard to CI / CD over BOSH. It was never built with a pipeline in mind. Moreover, Ops Manager is and will always be constrained when compared to using BOSH. It will never catch up with BOSH's flexibility, no matter how many BOSH features we expose in the Ops Manager interface.

Finally, last week, we converged on a plan. Here it is in a nutshell:

There is too much uncertainty in continuing with the Ops Manager "split" track. How a user gets up and running with BOSH has neither been designed nor scoped. That experience would be a step backwards for Ops Manager in terms of UX and delay our ability to land on Azure, our highest priority.

Getting to Azure using our existing Ops Manager strategy, rather than a BYOB strategy, makes sense based on the factors in (1).

BOSH is unsupportable in its current form, but we will invest in it in the near-term, and launch a PCF-BOSH product that is documented, and branded as Pivotal's, as quickly as possible.

When BOSH is a supportable product, Ops Manager will go into a maintenance mode. Tile authors will shift from producing tiles to producing BOSH based "tiles" or "bundles" as we are referring to them.

The metrics team is building a platform visualization tool. It shows BOSH deployments, the health of those deployments, and lets you view metrics in different ways / dimensions. This may be the next generation "Ops Manager." A read only operational dashboard.

Two infrastructures will follow Azure. Google cloud is very close to AWS in terms of its quality and taxonomy. Photon is very close to vSphere and we may be able to toggle our vSphere appliance to support it, since Photon works with ova appliances and is based on vSphere ESX/i.

Best,

Reider
	TL;DR: We are not going to ship the "split release" of Ops Manager. We are going to ship Ops Manager for Azure, GCP, and Photon separately, and work on UX for BOSH so we can support BOSH as an official Pivotal product.

	As you may know, we had this plan to split BOSH out of Ops Manager to ship on Azure, GCP, and Photon.

	A couple of months ago I started arguing that this was unnecessary. This has resulted in a change of plan.

	My opinion was that Pivotal should productize BOSH, add some usability features, provide BOSH support via Zendesk, and invest in documentation and branding for BOSH. At the same time, I felt it was important to shift Ops Manager into something of a read-only dashboard for BOSH deployments.

	My views stem from constant customer feedback about how Ops Manager misses the mark. Ops Manager is hard to CI / CD over BOSH. It was never built with a pipeline in mind. Moreover, Ops Manager is and will always be constrained when compared to using BOSH. It will never catch up with BOSH's flexibility, no matter how many BOSH features we expose in the Ops Manager interface.

	Finally, last week, we converged on a plan. Here it is in a nutshell:

	There is too much uncertainty in continuing with the Ops Manager "split" track. How a user gets up and running with BOSH has neither been designed nor scoped. That experience would be a step backwards for Ops Manager in terms of UX and delay our ability to land on Azure, our highest priority.

	Getting to Azure using our existing Ops Manager strategy, rather than a BYOB strategy, makes sense based on the factors in (1).

	BOSH is unsupportable in its current form, but we will invest in it in the near-term, and launch a PCF-BOSH product that is documented, and branded as Pivotal's, as quickly as possible.

	When BOSH is a supportable product, Ops Manager will go into a maintenance mode. Tile authors will shift from producing tiles to producing BOSH based "tiles" or "bundles" as we are referring to them.

	The metrics team is building a platform visualization tool. It shows BOSH deployments, the health of those deployments, and lets you view metrics in different ways / dimensions. This may be the next generation "Ops Manager." A read only operational dashboard.

	Two infrastructures will follow Azure. Google cloud is very close to AWS in terms of its quality and taxonomy. Photon is very close to vSphere and we may be able to toggle our vSphere appliance to support it, since Photon works with ova appliances and is based on vSphere ESX/i.

	Best,

	Reider