Pivotal Shifts to Kubernetes: PAS on Kubernetes, Build Service, and RabbitMQ Announced

This article is based on reporting originally published by devclass.com in July 2019, covering Pivotal’s Kubernetes announcements.

Pivotal Makes a Major Bet on Kubernetes

In July 2019, Pivotal announced a significant strategic shift toward Kubernetes, unveiling alpha versions of three Kubernetes-integrated products. The centerpiece was a Kubernetes-powered edition of its flagship Pivotal Application Service (PAS) platform — a move that signaled the company was embedding container orchestration deeply into its core product line.

The announcements came roughly a month after Pivotal — then backed by Dell and VMware — faced sharp criticism from investors over its perceived slowness in adopting Kubernetes, a criticism that coincided with the company scaling back its financial forecasts and a stock price that fell nearly 50 percent. CEO Rob Mee had, however, already flagged the Kubernetes direction during the earnings call, suggesting the product announcements were part of a planned roadmap rather than a reactive pivot.

PAS on Kubernetes: The Key Announcement

The headline product was an alpha release of Pivotal Application Service running on Kubernetes. Pivotal’s own blog described Kubernetes as “the new IaaS” and stated the company was “embedding it into more parts of Pivotal technology.”

The alpha was positioned as a proof-of-concept supporting the most important PAS capabilities, including:

• cf push support for buildpack-based applications, preserving the familiar Cloud Foundry developer experience
• App instances running as Kubernetes pods, integrating PAS workloads natively into the Kubernetes scheduler
• Scaling to at least 50 app instances in this initial release

Future roadmap items at the time included multi-cloud support — specifically AKS on Microsoft Azure and GKE on Google Cloud Platform — as well as the ability to deploy PAS on Kubernetes alongside existing PAS environments, enabling incremental adoption rather than a forced migration.

Pivotal Build Service: From Source Code to OCI Images

The second announcement was an alpha of Pivotal Build Service, integrated with Enterprise PKS (Pivotal and VMware’s joint Kubernetes distribution). Pivotal described the service as a declarative way to build OCI-compatible container images directly from source code, saying it “picks up where the Dockerfile workflow leaves off.”

The practical value proposition was image lifecycle management: the Build Service was designed to keep container images consistent and automatically up to date with the latest base image patches. Pivotal summarized this benefit as eliminating “snowflake containers” — the problem of inconsistent, manually maintained images that diverge from a known good baseline over time.

RabbitMQ for Kubernetes

The third product announced was RabbitMQ for Kubernetes, aimed at simplifying the operational overhead of running the popular open-source message broker inside Kubernetes environments. Pivotal positioned this as reducing the complexity of deploying and managing RabbitMQ clusters as Kubernetes-native workloads.

Alpha Status and Access by Request

All three products were released as alpha software, with general availability timelines not announced at that point. Access was available by request only — a standard approach for early-stage enterprise software intended to manage onboarding, gather structured feedback, and avoid support commitments before the product stabilizes.

These announcements followed the launch of Pivotal Service Mesh in May 2019, which brought Istio and Envoy proxy to the Pivotal platform — also as an alpha program — indicating a broader, multi-quarter effort to build out a cloud-native infrastructure stack around Kubernetes.

Context: Investor Pressure and the Kubernetes Imperative

Pivotal’s share price had fallen close to 50 percent in the weeks before these announcements after the company reported that some deals had slipped and issued financial guidance below analyst expectations. While CEO Rob Mee sought to reassure analysts by highlighting the upcoming Kubernetes integrations as an opportunity to expand Pivotal’s addressable market, investors at the time viewed the company’s trajectory as too slow relative to the broader industry shift toward Kubernetes-native platforms.

For DevOps teams already invested in the Cloud Foundry ecosystem, these announcements represented a pragmatic path forward: retaining familiar developer workflows like cf push while gaining the scheduling, portability, and ecosystem benefits of Kubernetes. Whether the alpha-stage products would mature fast enough to satisfy both developers and investors remained the open question in mid-2019.

Summary of Pivotal’s July 2019 Kubernetes Announcements