Cloud Foundry Changes Captains, Keeps Sites on Kubernetes

Source:-sdxcentral.com

The Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF) has changed leadership with CTO Chip Childers taking over the executive director position from Abby Kearns. The move also comes with an increased focus by CFF on integrating the Kubernetes ecosystem into the Cloud Foundry stable of curated platforms.

Chip Childers said in an interview with SDxCentral that the transition is “a great moment in time” where the group has the opportunity to become “very laser focused on the most important aspects of what the foundation has been doing historically.” He added that the the group will continue to be stewards for the community it has been serving for years and help them continue to grow and become “great participants in the broader open source ecosystem.”

For CFF, this means continued tightening of its work with Kubernetes. Childers noted that Kubernetes remains a hard platform to use in production environments, which should be amply clear by the numerous managed Kubernetes platforms being offered by vendors.

CFF has picked its path understanding that it can’t be all things to all people, selling Cloud Foundry as the simplified, nice and easy-to-use layer on top of Kubernetes to build “the best enterprise developer experience” and avoid “any of the infrastructure conversation.”

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Cloud Foundry Closer to Kubernetes
The Cloud Foundry Foundation has been slowly integrating support for Kubernetes into its cadre of curated Cloud Foundry platforms, though those efforts have recently gained steam.

Project Eirini, which was adopted into the CFF in late 2018, is a bridge between the organization’s legacy Diego container management system and Kubernetes. More realistically, it’s the platform on which Cloud Foundry users will build their Kubernetes-orchestrated container futures on top of. What this move will mean for Cloud Foundry is that it will become the application-control layer sitting on top of Kubernetes, which will act as the infrastructure-control layer.

Last month, the CFF adopted the open source KubeCF runtime as an incubating project. It also builds on the CFF’s Project Quarks, which is a way to deploy Cloud Foundry’s Bosh container runtime as a container on top of Kubernetes.

“The Cloud Foundry community’s mission is to curate from the broader open source ecosystem, as well as the software that our community creates to provide a developer centric platform,” Childers said.

Childers said that the CFF will also increase its focus on supporting the community, zeroing in on diversity, inclusivity, and finding ways that the group can embrace newcomers. He also specifically cited finding new ways to support its commercial activity by reaching out to enterprise developers that might not have access to modern platforms and tethering them to old processes.

Over the course of the coming year, CFF is planning to host a number of programs that are designed to “help move the whole software development industry forward by reaching to the late adopters and bringing them along for the ride,” Childers said.

Perhaps, in the case of CFF, a slow hand is better than premature action. As for now, only time will tell. Childers did indicate that the group has some more “interesting news” coming out “every week this month.”

Kearns had served as executive director of CFF since late 2016, having taken over for Sam Ramji who left to follow previous CFF Executive Director Diane Greene to Google.