Thirteen years ago yesterday, I was speaking at the first meeting of the London Platform-as-a-Service User Group (now, the London Platform User Group, aka LOPUG). I’d joined VMware a few weeks before, and this was one of my earliest speaking gigs telling the story about the open source Cloud Foundry platform.

At least I archived the Tweet about it, because apparently I didn’t write a blog post, and I can’t find the slides from that event. Look, historical proof!

Yesterday, the meetup celebrated 13 years since that first edition!

The plan was to bring together the original presenters and hosts as a panel to revisit the topics and talk about what had happened in the industry and in our careers in the meantime. Unfortunately, the original host (Russ) was unable to join at the last minute, but Tareq and I were the original speakers, and were both available for the panel, moderated by my friend Paula Kennedy.

I wrote a short thread on Mastodon with some thoughts – here’s a slightly longer version.

At #Accurx in London for a panel revisiting the first edition of the London Platform User Group (LOPUG) – I was a speaker at the first event, 13 years ago (in my #CloudFoundry days), and on the panel this evening! https://meetu.ps/e/NSspR/vXk8/i

— Andy Piper (@andypiper) 2025-05-14T17:42:31.745Z

The evening was a trip down memory lane, and a thought-provoking look at how much has changed – and what might be coming next. Thirteen years ago, my focus was on telling the Cloud Foundry story, advocating for private and hybrid cloud solutions based on open source to VMware (later Pivotal) customers across the UK, Europe, and beyond. Platform as a Service (PaaS) was the buzzword, and we were excited about its potential.

A couple of years after the original event, I joined Twitter. Now that I’m a few years on from that period of my life, I actually had to go back and remind myself of the internal Twitter cloud stack of Apache Mesos and Aurora etc. There’s a good piece about that (featuring my buddy Chris Anisczyk from back in the day!) if you want to take the same diversion I did ahead of the meetup last night!

Fast forward to today, and the PaaS market has been significantly reshaped, largely by the rise of Kubernetes and other technologies. The landscape is very different. Apparently, somewhere along the line we lost the ease of deployment that platforms like Heroku and Cloud Foundry were well known for … progress

During the panel, I was asked about future predictions. My attention turned towards the growing push for digital sovereignty, particularly in Europe, and the emergence of concepts like the EuroStack. It’s a clear indication of a shift in priorities, and a desire for greater control over data and digital infrastructure.

It was an interesting moment of self-reflection too. I realized how my own world view has evolved, broadening from my primary focus on enterprise software stacks in my IBM and VMware days, to encompass a wider social perspective which connects to my work with social networks, and more evolved views about politics and economics in general.

Later in the evening, there was a brief discussion about whether current global events and trends are steering us towards a more complex business and technical environment. The suggestion was that an increased need for local negotiations and agreements could potentially slow everything down. This seems very likely, to me – the consequence of tariffs, breaches of trust, and protectionist behaviours from those looking to control their own domains, as opposed to those who champion collaboration and shared respect as drivers of progress.

And you know what? I find myself thinking that slowing things down might not necessarily be a bad thing. Perhaps a more deliberate pace is exactly what’s needed right now.

It was a really engaging evening, and it’s nice to see LOPUG still going strong. Thanks to Paula and the team for inviting me to join the panel – this was a lot of fun to come back to.

(shout out to Daniel Bryant for the photo I’m in above, thanks Daniel!)

https://andypiper.co.uk/2025/05/15/revisiting-the-clouds/