Cloud Foundry Advances Platform Capabilities to Include Native Support for Docker and .NET

"The advances we’re making across the Cloud Foundry ecosystem are inspiring," said Cloud Foundry Foundation CEO Sam Ramji, "The world’s leading companies in every market are building their businesses on Cloud Foundry. More importantly, they’re joining the cause and signing up as members to take a hands-on role in building out critical capabilities for their shared future."

Project Promotions
The Foundation’s Runtime PMC has promoted the Diego, Garden and Greenhouse projects from incubating status to active status. Diego is a cutting-edge version of the Cloud Foundry runtime layer, providing a more flexible architecture. Garden is Cloud Foundry’s container orchestration layer. Greenhouse enables support for .NET within the platform. Together, these projects significantly enhance the capabilities of Cloud Foundry by including native support for Docker containers and .NET applications.

Because Cloud Foundry supports .NET, organizations have the flexibility to work with a mix of both Linux and Windows applications. Cloud Foundry .NET applications run natively on Windows Server 2012 R2 virtual machines. Cloud Foundry also can manage applications with the same commands and many of the same operational benefits as Linux container based applications, including log aggregation and automatic health monitoring and recovery.

Cloud Foundry’s support for Docker based applications enables developers to choose between pushing code or pushing container images into the platform. It gives developers consistency in how the applications are managed and scaled. Additionally, Garden will use the Open Container Initiative‘s runC implementation as its default container. Many Cloud Foundry Foundation members including Cisco, Docker, EMC, Fujitsu, HP, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Pivotal, SUSE and VMware are also participating in the Open Container Initiative, sharing Cloud Foundry’s container management experience to improve the project.

"Project teams will continue to support the current DEA-based runtime architecture, ensuring that the Cloud Foundry ecosystem is able to make a smooth transition from one architecture to the next," said Cloud Foundry Foundation Vice President of Technology Chip Childers. "Today, the Cloud Foundry platform is able to use either runtime architecture, or run the two architectures in parallel within the same environment at scale."

Community Growth Across Europe
Since the independent Cloud Foundry Foundation launched earlier this year, development progress continues to accelerate with dramatic increases in contributions to the project. More than half of the Foundation’s members are based in Europe and/or have a significant European presence. The Cloud Foundry user community in Europe continues to expand as well, with 39 self-organized local groups, attracting more than 6,279 members across Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Spain and other countries.

The first Cloud Foundry Summit Europe was held this week in Berlin with more than 450 application developers, IT operations experts, technical managers, business leaders, service providers and project contributors. Attendees are seeing how organizations like Comic Relief, Fidelity International, SAP, Springer Nature, the US Government’s Department 18F and Swisscom are using Cloud Foundry to meet their innovation needs. Attendees are also getting a first look at Cloud Foundry advancements announced this week including:

• SAP and SUSE Collaborate on OpenStack CPI for Cloud Foundry: The OpenStack CPI project aims to make it easy to deploy Cloud Foundry on OpenStack infrastructure, whether the cloud is public or private. This will help simplify application testing and deployment for a wide range of cloud users. SUSE will collaborate closely with SAP to help ensure the cloud provider interface fully supports OpenStack infrastructure.
• New Release of Pivotal Cloud Foundry: Now generally available with support for .NET applications, Spring Cloud Services, and SCM. This latest release also supports artifact management, CI/CD and agile project management tooling through strategic partnerships with JFrog, GitLab, and CloudBees. Pivotal also announced early access to Pivotal Cloud Foundry for Microsoft Azure and beta support for Docker images.
• New PaaS offering from HPE Helion Enables Cloud Application Deployment on Any Cloud Infrastructure: HPE announces complete integration of the recent Stackato acquisition into the Helion product portfolio with HPE Helion Stackato, the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering based on Cloud Foundry technology that enables customers to develop and run their application on AWS, Azure, VMware, etc. HPE Helion Development Platform continues to be the HPE solution for customers who want a tight integration with HPE Helion OpenStack or HPE Helion CloudSystem, which enables the development, delivery and deployment of cloud apps in the context of more controlled enterprise environments.
• Redis-as-a-Service Now Available on the Swisscom Application Cloud: The Redis open-source in-memory database is the latest addition to an already broad range of services for Swisscom’s Cloud Foundry-based public PaaS offering.
• anynines New Enterprise Division: anynines Enterprise offers production grade, secure, clustered and self-provisioning Cloud Foundry services such as MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis and more in addition to training consulting and operations.
• mimacom Showcases Real Customer Cloud Foundry Projects: The Cloud Foundry member and Summit sponsor is sharing real customer successes from various industries including automotive, healthcare and telecommunication.