The Cloud Foundry Foundation announced that seven major providers — Atos, Cloud.gov, IBM, SAP, SUSE, Swisscom, and VMware — renewed their Cloud Foundry Platform Certification for 2020. The most significant change in this certification cycle is that providers can now choose Kubernetes-based Eirini as their internal container orchestration layer, in addition to or instead of the longer-established Diego scheduler.
What Is Cloud Foundry Platform Certification?
Cloud Foundry Platform Certification is the Cloud Foundry Foundation’s official verification program. It guarantees that any product or service carrying the Cloud Foundry name uses the same core Cloud Foundry software and meets the technical standards set by the Foundation’s technical governing body. Key goals of the certification include:
- Consistency: All certified platforms share the same underlying Cloud Foundry Application Runtime components.
- Portability: Applications developed on one certified platform can be moved to another without re-platforming effort.
- Reliability: Strict technical requirements must be met before the Cloud Foundry mark can be applied to any product.
- Annual recertification: Providers must recertify every year, ensuring ongoing compliance as the platform evolves.
Only products that pass these requirements are permitted to use the “Cloud Foundry” designation commercially.
The Key 2020 Change: Kubernetes as a First-Class Scheduler
Historically, Cloud Foundry used Diego as its internal container scheduler and runtime. The 2020 certification introduces an officially supported alternative: Eirini, a project that replaces Diego’s container scheduling layer with Kubernetes. Providers can now certify using:
- Diego only — the traditional Cloud Foundry container runtime.
- Eirini (Kubernetes-backed) only — replacing Diego’s scheduling with native Kubernetes primitives.
- Both Diego and Eirini — offering operators flexibility to choose at deployment time.
This is the first year that Kubernetes has been eligible to serve as the default container scheduler within a certified Cloud Foundry platform. The intent is to let Cloud Foundry operators and developers benefit from Cloud Foundry’s well-known developer experience — a simple cf push workflow, built-in routing, service bindings, and multi-language buildpack support — while running on a Kubernetes substrate that operations teams may already manage.
“This is the first year the Cloud Foundry Platform Certification allows Kubernetes to be the default container scheduler, giving developers more flexibility to run their apps across any Cloud Foundry instance in the language and framework of their choice. The mission of the Cloud Foundry community is to simplify the developer experience, and we have accomplished this with the new Platform Certification requirements, as we bring the Cloud Foundry developer experience to Kubernetes users.”
— Chip Childers, Executive Director, Cloud Foundry Foundation
2020 Certified Cloud Foundry Platforms
The following seven platforms renewed their Cloud Foundry Platform Certification for 2020:
- Atos Cloud Foundry
- Cloud.gov
- IBM Cloud Foundry
- SAP Cloud Platform
- SUSE Cloud Application Platform
- Swisscom Application Cloud
- VMware Tanzu Application Service
Why This Matters for DevOps and Platform Teams
The Eirini integration addresses a tension that many enterprise platform teams face: Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for container orchestration, but its raw API surface is complex for application developers. Cloud Foundry has long offered a high-level abstraction — developers push source code or a container image and the platform handles routing, health management, scaling, and service injection — without needing to write Kubernetes manifests.
By allowing Kubernetes to underpin that abstraction, organisations can:
- Consolidate on a single container orchestration layer (Kubernetes) across different workload types.
- Leverage existing Kubernetes operational tooling, RBAC models, and infrastructure integrations.
- Offer application developers the familiar
cf pushexperience without exposing Kubernetes complexity. - Run certified workloads on any Kubernetes-capable infrastructure, including AWS, GCP, Azure, IBM Cloud, OpenStack, and VMware vSphere.
About Cloud Foundry
Cloud Foundry is an open source platform backed by major technology vendors including Dell EMC, Google, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, SUSE, and VMware. It is used in production by large enterprises in manufacturing, telecommunications, and financial services. Cloud Foundry’s container-based architecture supports applications written in any language or framework through its buildpack system, and it runs on a wide range of cloud providers and on-premises infrastructure.
Further Reading
For more detail on the Eirini project and how it integrates Kubernetes into Cloud Foundry, see the Cloud Foundry Foundation website and the Eirini project on GitHub.