[ad_1]
In a typical year, the Cloud Foundry project would host its annual European Summit in Dublin this week. But we are in 2020, so it is a virtual event. This year, however, has been a transformative year for the open source platform-as-a-service project, in more ways than one. With the departure of Cloud Foundry CEO Abby Kearns earlier this year, the organization’s former CTO Chip Childers took over. Perhaps most importantly, however, the project’s shift to Kubernetes as its container orchestration tool of choice, and a renewed focus on the Cloud Foundry developer experience, is now starting to pay off.
“In April, I took over. I said, ‘Listen, our community has a new North Star. It’s to go take the Cloud Foundry developer experience and get that thing back to the platform on Kubernetes. No more delays, no more diversity of thought here. Time to make the move, ‘”Childers said (with a smile). “And here we are. It’s October, we have our ecosystem aligned, we have major project launches that are fulfilling that vision. And we have a community that is very excited about that, continuing the work of advancing this integration with a lot of – native projects “.
Developers using Cloud Foundry, Childers argued, love it, but the project now has the opportunity to showcase a broader range of potential use that can deliver a smoother developer experience in addition to virtually any Kubernetes cluster.
One of the projects that is working to make this happen, and that reached version 1.0 today, is cf-for-k8s. Traditionally, getting started with Cloud Foundry was a chore, and something that most companies left to third-party vendors. This new project, which was launched in April, allows developers to build a relatively lightweight Cloud Foundry distribution on top of a Kubernetes cluster, using projects like Istio and Fluentd, in addition to Kubernetes, and to do it in minutes.
“It comes along with the whole process of reinventing our architecture to incorporate other projects in a much more aggressive way and allows us to reach parity of functions. [with the classic VM-focused Cloud Foundry experience] using many more open source companion projects, “Childers said of the larger role of this project in the broader ecosystem.” That allows our community to focus less on building plumbing and [spend] more time to think about how to accelerate innovation and developer experience. “
This wouldn’t be open source if there wasn’t another project that does something quite similar, at least at first glance. That’s KubeCF, which hit its 2.5 release today. This is an open source distribution of Cloud Foundry Application Runtime that Childers explained is intended for production use and was originally intended to provide existing users with a bridge to the Kubernetes train. Over time, these two projects are likely to merge. “Everyone is collaborating on what this shared vision looks like. It’s just, it’s just two different distros that handle the different use cases today,” Childers explained.
After six months in his new position, Childers noticed that right now he is seeing a lot of energy in the community. Work is hard, he said, when there is unhealthy disagreement, but right now, what he’s seeing is “a beautiful harmony of agreement.”
Cloud Foundry Foundation CEO Abby Kearns resigns to seek new executive position elsewhere
