Cloud Foundry Focus on Interoperability Continues with Two New Projects Integrating Kubernetes
October 15, 2018
Cloud Foundry Foundation, home of a family of open source projects including Cloud Foundry Application Runtime, Cloud Foundry Container Runtime, and Cloud Foundry BOSH, announced two new projects have been accepted by the Project Management Committees in order to further integrate Kubernetes with Cloud Foundry technologies. The news was announced at the Cloud Foundry EU Summit in Basel, Switzerland, taking place today through October 11.
The projects, Eirini and CF Containerization, have been accepted by two of the Cloud Foundry Project Management Committees (PMCs), which oversee platform engineering of the open source projects. CF Containerization has been accepted to incubate within the BOSH PMC while Eirini is an incubating effort within the Application Runtime PMC. Announced at last year’s European Summit, Cloud Foundry Container Runtime (CFCR) is housed in the Extensions PMC and also takes advantage of Kubernetes.
"Eirini and CF Containerization are the latest examples of the Cloud Foundry community’s approach to continuously exploring future evolutionary directions for the platform," said Chip Childers, CTO, Cloud Foundry Foundation. "Developers have made it clear they need a simple, agile and flexible delivery method to push apps to production, which Cloud Foundry Application Runtime delivers. They also have multiple use cases in which deployment and management of software packaged into containers is critical. These new projects demonstrate additional approaches to combining Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry technologies."
Eirini, proposed by IBM and seeing contributions from IBM, SUSE and SAP, is working towards allowing operators and product vendors to use Kubernetes as the underlying container scheduler for the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime. Container schedulers are becoming increasingly commoditized with many businesses standardizing on Kubernetes. The Eirini project’s goal is to provide developers with the "cf push" experience that makes it easy to push an app to production on top of Kubernetes.
CF Containerization, initially developed and donated to the Foundation by SUSE, is designed to package Cloud Foundry BOSH releases into containers and deploy those containers into Kubernetes. The intent of this project is to enable operators to deploy the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime into existing Kubernetes clusters.
CFCR, developed and donated by Google and Pivotal, is the Cloud Foundry community’s approach to deploying and managing Kubernetes clusters using the BOSH release engineering tool chain. The project makes deploying and managing containers in an enterprise environment easier and more flexible.
In addition to CFCR, Eirini and CF Containerization, the Cloud Foundry community has actively embraced the end user desire for a more consistent operational experience between application and container platforms. There are now projects that focus on shared logging and metrics; unified networking via technologies like Istio; and Open Service Broker API (OSBAPI)-compliant service catalog synchronization. Recently, the buildpack technology originally popularized by Cloud Foundry and Heroku was accepted into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, home of Kubernetes, as an incubating project.
All this and more will be discussed at Cloud Foundry EU Summit this week, with more than 1,000 enterprise developers, architects, engineers and executives from around the world expected to attend. Attendees will learn about Cloud Foundry from those who build and use it every day. They will join other developers, end users and CIOs to gain first-hand access to Cloud Foundry roadmaps, training and tutorials, and to see how others are using Cloud Foundry to support continuous innovation and application portability.