More than 50% of the Fortune 500 companies are now using the open-source Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a-Service project — either directly or through vendors like Pivotal — to build, test and deploy their applications. Like so many other projects, including the likes of OpenStack, Cloud Foundry went through a bit of a transition in recent years as more and more developers started looking to containers — and especially the Kubernetes project — as a platform on which to develop. Now, however, the project is ready to focus on what always differentiated it from its closed- and open-source competitors: the developer experience.
Long before Docker popularized containers for application deployment, though, Cloud Foundry had already bet on containers and written its own orchestration service, for example. With all of the momentum behind Kubernetes, though, it’s no surprise that many in the Cloud Foundry started to look at this new project to replace the existing container technology.
Over the course of the last two years, Cloud Foundry added both a Kubernetes-based service for managing containers from third-party vendors, as well as the so-called Project Eirini that uses Kubernetes as an alternative deployment surface and another project that allows operators to run Cloud Foundry itself on Kubernetes clusters. All of this wasn’t without some pain and confusion in the Cloud Foundry ecosystem, but it looks like the project is now at a point where it can put all of this behind it.
“We’re really happy about the re-convergence of the Cloud Foundry vendor community around the new architecture,” Cloud Foundry Foundation CTO Chip Childers told me ahead of the project’s bi-annual Summit this week. “We’ve gotten all the vendors looking at this now as the future path, which, frankly, now frees up the project. There’s still some work to do to complete that transition — and we’re going to do that as a community with a lot of maturities.”
This transition period, with vendors like IBM, SUSE and SAP introducing new Kubernetes-based technologies, was a natural phase in the project’s development, in the Foundation’s view. “The re-convergence of the vendor opinion around the future architecture is critical because we need to go through the phase where there’s differences of opinion, but we’ve reached the point where it’s clear that the opinions re-converged. The work of Project Eirini represents the future,” said Childers.
He also stressed that there is a significant overlap between the vendor and developer communities that work on Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes — and for a while, those vendors had to back and invest into two different but closely related technologies.
Childers believes that the ecosystem is currently at a point where it’s more aligned than it has been for a while, and with this technology transition mostly out of the way, the Cloud Foundry community can now focus back on the developer experience. “Even something as disruptive as to the whole industry as the rise of Kubernetes, we see that as an opportunity for simplification of our architecture and a new home of the developer experience,” said Childers.
That developer experience, Childers said, is now going to come front and center again for the community. “As our technical community gets to spend more time evolving our developer experience, it’s just going to continue to accelerate the continuous improvement cycle that we have there,” he said.
“A lot of our projects, they really try their best to distill a lot of the complexity in things like service mesh technologies or Canary deployments or blue/green deployments — they try to turn these into incredibly easy to use commands or configurations. If you want to do some of these things in raw Kubernetes, you’re writing pages and pages of the YAML files.”
Cloud Foundry, at its core, has always wanted to offer an experience that is optimized for an enterprise developer and that allows that developer to focus on writing the code without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. That’s not something the Kubernetes community — at least for the time being — is all that interested in.
A lot of developers, however, are currently spending a lot of time on the underlying infrastructure configuration for their application instead of on the applications themselves, Childers argues. “Those Kubernetes configurations aren’t a good use of their time,” he said.
“And I want to emphasize that I’m not framing this as a fault of the Kubernetes community. I think it’s actually great that many, if not most, recognize that they have built this very powerful infrastructure abstraction and now it’s time to look for what’s the right developer experience and the CF community is offering a battle-test offering there.”
Kubernetes has become the new “infrastructure dial tone,” as Childers described it. He believes that the Cloud Foundry community shines in building the right developer experience. “We deeply understand the enterprise developer context. We deeply understand all of the options that are emerging, or that existed previously and we want stuff to work well together,” he said. “Let’s take all that experience and all that knowledge that we have and push forward.”