Source: devclass.com. Original announcement date: June 2019.
Overview
Pivotal announced general availability of Cloud Foundry v2.6 in June 2019, highlighting four notable features across its platform. Of those four, one shipped in beta, two were flagged as “coming soon,” and one — Spinnaker integration — was available immediately via an update to the Spinnaker project itself. Here is a practical breakdown of each feature and what it means for development and operations teams.
1. Custom Sidecar Processes in Pivotal Application Service (Beta)
The headline feature — though still in beta at release time — is custom sidecar processes in Pivotal Application Service (PAS). This capability allows developers to run additional processes inside the same container as their primary application workload.
Sidecars are a well-established pattern in container-based architectures (popularised in part by Kubernetes and service mesh tooling), and their arrival in Cloud Foundry’s PAS fills a long-standing gap for teams that need lightweight in-container helpers without managing separate deployments.
Practical use cases for custom sidecars
- Proxy forwarding — run a local proxy (e.g., Envoy) alongside the application to intercept and route traffic without modifying application code.
- Client-side load balancing — implement ribbon-style or custom load balancing logic in a sidecar rather than embedding it in every application.
- Retry and circuit-breaking logic — co-locate resilience patterns in a sidecar process so they can be updated independently of the application.
- Log shipping and telemetry agents — run a metrics or log forwarding agent that shares the application’s network and filesystem namespace.
Because the sidecar runs in the same container, it shares the loopback interface with the primary process, which simplifies inter-process communication compared to running a separate application instance.
2. Spinnaker 1.14 Integration with Pivotal Cloud Foundry
Spinnaker 1.14 added native support for several advanced continuous delivery scenarios targeting Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF). Spinnaker is an open-source, multi-cloud CD platform originally developed at Netflix and now widely used for managing complex deployment pipelines at scale.
The integration means large development teams can use Spinnaker’s pipeline primitives — canary deployments, automated rollbacks, approval gates, and multi-region strategies — and target a PCF foundation as the deployment destination, rather than only Kubernetes or cloud VM targets.
This is significant for enterprises running hybrid estates: teams that already use Spinnaker to deploy to Kubernetes clusters can now manage PCF deployments from the same tool and pipeline model, reducing the operational overhead of maintaining separate CD systems.
3. New Permissions Model in Concourse for PCF (Coming Soon — v5.2)
Concourse, Pivotal’s CI/CD pipeline tool, was slated to receive a substantially improved permissions model in version 5.2. Key additions announced for that release included:
- Five distinct roles for access control, enabling better segmentation of who can view, trigger, or administer build pipelines.
- Faster container and volume cleanup to reduce resource consumption on busy worker nodes.
- CredHub compatibility for secrets management, allowing pipelines to retrieve credentials from CredHub rather than storing them directly in pipeline YAML.
Role-based access control in CI/CD tooling is particularly valuable for large organisations where multiple teams share a single Concourse installation. Granular roles reduce the risk of accidental or unauthorised pipeline modifications while preserving developer autonomy for day-to-day operations.
4. Multi-Datacenter MySQL Replication (Coming Soon — Beta)
Pivotal also previewed multi-datacenter replication for MySQL, targeting higher availability and scalability for database-backed applications on PCF. The feature was in beta at the time of the v2.6 announcement.
The proposed architecture follows a leader-follower model:
- Operators create a leader-follower MySQL instance spanning two PCF foundations (datacenters).
- Applications bound to either foundation can read from or write to the MySQL instance according to the replication topology.
- In a disaster recovery scenario, developers or operators can trigger a failover to promote the follower site to leader, minimising downtime.
- The same mechanism supports planned datacenter maintenance — one site can be taken offline for maintenance while the other continues serving traffic.
For teams running stateful workloads on PCF, this capability addresses one of the harder problems in the platform’s history: providing database-level resilience across availability zones or physical datacenters without requiring custom external tooling.
Enterprise PKS 1.4 and Kubernetes Tooling
Alongside the v2.6 release, Pivotal also highlighted Enterprise PKS (Pivotal Container Service) 1.4 and a set of Kubernetes-focused CLI tools: ytt, kbld, kapp, and kwt. These tools, now part of the Carvel toolchain (later open-sourced by VMware), provide composable utilities for templating Kubernetes configuration, building and tagging images, and applying changes to a cluster.
These items had been announced a few weeks earlier and were not new to the v2.6 release itself, but their inclusion in Pivotal’s messaging reflected a deliberate effort to signal stronger investment in the Kubernetes ecosystem.
Context: Pivotal and the Kubernetes Transition
The v2.6 release arrived at a difficult moment for Pivotal commercially. The company had reduced its financial forecasts earlier in June 2019, and faced criticism from financial analysts who argued that it had been slow to adapt to the industry’s shift toward Kubernetes-native architectures.
The features in v2.6 — particularly the sidecar support, Spinnaker integration, and the Kubernetes tooling — can be read as a direct response to that criticism: an attempt to demonstrate that Cloud Foundry and PCF could coexist with, and interoperate with, the Kubernetes ecosystem rather than compete against it.
Pivotal was subsequently acquired by VMware in December 2019, and many of the product lines mentioned in this release were eventually folded into VMware Tanzu.
Summary
| Feature | Status at v2.6 GA | Key Benefit |
|---|---|---|
| Custom sidecar processes (PAS) | Beta | Run co-located helper processes (proxies, agents) in the same container |
| Spinnaker 1.14 PCF integration | GA (via Spinnaker update) | Advanced CD pipelines targeting PCF from a single multi-cloud CD tool |
| Concourse v5.2 permissions + CredHub | Coming soon | Role-based pipeline access control and secrets management |
| Multi-datacenter MySQL replication | Coming soon (beta) | Leader-follower HA and disaster recovery for stateful database apps |
For teams evaluating these capabilities today, note that Pivotal’s product lines have been significantly reorganised under VMware Tanzu since 2019. Equivalent or successor features should be verified against current VMware Tanzu documentation.