Worked on a software project built on top of Predix. It was like building software on quicksand how often predix and cloudfoundry would fail.

Does Predix track cf-release, to your knowledge?

We track it on PWS, meaning we're upgrading the whole platform live every week or two. So I'm surprised it's unstable for you.

It might have been how shittilly our app was built and everyone I talked to was just shifting blame to the the Predix/CF team.

But, correct me if I'm wrong,...isn't predix and cloudfoundry all hosted on top of AWS instances at the moment?

All of our URLs were AWS urls. It was funny.

We were hosting on top of our competition.

Predix POCs were on AWS but have migrated primarily to internal datacenters after customers expressed little interest in running applications using Predix on AWS. Not sure if this is poor foresight by the Predix team or an unexpected change in customer sentiment.

I'd be surprised if anyone outside Silicon Valley in GE's LOBs wanted to consider AWS for production considering how many have likely invested greatly into their own datacenters as well as the general trends of non-technology companies to fear an external cloud first instinctively regardless of how poorly managed their internal IT is. This puts GE in a poor position potentially in that even if they create a great platform that their customers that are perhaps even more technology phobic will need to invest money as well into areas they historically have failed to generate much ROI from. But perhaps GE's dominance / position can help them here and these concerns are long addressed.

I can't speak for where Predix is hosted.

PWS is on AWS. But Cloud Foundry itself can be mounted on AWS, OpenStack, Azure, GPC is coming and others I've forgotten.

There are two.. AWS and hosted in virgina.. AWS is FAR better then hosted.. the hosted predix is 90% of the issues

What was the failure mode for Cloud Foundry? Going down completely, rejecting commands, etc?

It was my experience it was just "Bye Felicia"

BUT it might have been how our app was coded we weren't taking advantage of some sort of built in failure hooks or something.

80% of the issues are caused by our shit infrastructure running on VMware.

CF is a pile of shit anyway. Its overly bloated and its hard to support and deal with

the running joke in the San Ramon office is if GE moved the building 20 minutes away.. 80% of the company would quit because their commute was too long

I'm formerly with a large non-offshore contractor for GE recently and you may even be familiar with me given I was in the middle of a number of outages related to AWS that impacted San Ramon and the rest of GE. There were other reasons for Predix outages than just network and compute infrastructure but I felt unable to prevent most of these outages with the limitations given to me structurally and architecturally.

The problem I see with an acquisition growth approach IMO is that I would only expect GE to retain maybe 20% of the engineers after 3 years due to the lack of adequate supporting infrastructure and cultural foundation to help long term engagement. None of the talks I watched from management at GE Digital sounded focused at all either - the vision is all over the place and sounded like children wishing for ponies and candy without explaining how to get there and what to prioritize. That lack of management focus is what start-up folks recognize as a recipe for failure regardless of funding level.

I agree 100%. Like all large companies there are some really sharp people at GE Digital. Here is my insider issues with GE

1) Sales/Execs push product. Predix is so beyond fucked its not funny. I don't think anyone can come in and fix all the tech debt. Sales will push new customers and force engineers to meet their deadlines. Execs won't allow engineers time to fix anything. Its just keep pushing out awful hacks and 70% working products.

2) Anything you say your manager might listen but it nothing will happen. In order to get anything done you have 10 meetings about it during the week.

This gets at the crux of the problem that I have with the GE recruiting commercials more than anything else - it's not as engineering-focused of a culture as it would lead you to believe. It's certainly a lot more hands-on "get things done" than many big companies I've seen (perhaps too much!), but it's still a big, boring company whose primary advantages are fundamentally "it's large" rather than based upon engineering innovations, and sales people have more power fundamentally than engineers. A great deal of people work really hard and people tend to be polite, but working smarter is far, far more important in technology than just effort, and appointing all your fresh, brightest college grads into management tracks as priority is furthering the brain drain problem.

pretty much describes GE.

The San Ramon office is like a h1b1 warehouse. I think they know they have these people almost locked in and take advantage of it. I've been here over a year and have yet to see a single person fired.

You could honestly fire 40% of the people in GE Digital and it'll function the same if not better then it did before