This article is based on reporting originally published at crn.com in August 2019, drawing on commentary from Solstice CTO Mike Koleno.
Background: Two Platforms, One Strategic Question
Large enterprises evaluating cloud-native application development in 2019 generally faced a choice between two open-source platforms: Cloud Foundry or Kubernetes. Each approach had a distinct philosophy, and the VMware–Pivotal acquisition brought that debate into sharp relief.
- Cloud Foundry is an opinionated Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). It abstracts away infrastructure decisions, giving developers a fast, standardised path to deploying and scaling applications across any cloud.
- Kubernetes is a container orchestrator that is highly customisable. It gives operations teams fine-grained control over networking, storage, scheduling and runtime behaviour, at the cost of greater operational complexity.
Both technologies are open source and capable of running workloads at scale across public, private and hybrid clouds. The choice between them generally came down to how much operational complexity an organisation was willing to own.
Pivotal’s Position Before the Acquisition
Pivotal Software was best known in the market as the company behind Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF), its commercial distribution of the Cloud Foundry PaaS. Pivotal had spearheaded the Cloud Foundry project and donated the core codebase to the Cloud Foundry Foundation.
Despite that brand association, Pivotal had been investing heavily in Kubernetes by 2019. Two parallel workstreams illustrated this:
- Pivotal Container Service (PKS) — a jointly developed Kubernetes-as-a-Service (KaaS) offering built with VMware and Google, designed to provision and manage enterprise-grade Kubernetes clusters.
- Kubernetes-based Pivotal Application Service — a version of Pivotal’s PaaS layer built on top of Kubernetes rather than Diego, the native Cloud Foundry container runtime. This move signalled that Kubernetes was becoming the preferred underlying runtime even within the Cloud Foundry ecosystem.
Both Pivotal and the upstream Cloud Foundry project were in the process of replacing Diego with Kubernetes as the container runtime, pointing toward deeper integration regardless of any corporate deal.
The Acquisition Logic: What VMware Stood to Gain
VMware and Pivotal were already sister companies under the Dell Technologies umbrella when acquisition talks emerged. Solstice, a Chicago-based technology consulting firm that partnered with both companies, offered a practitioner’s perspective on the strategic rationale.
Solstice CTO Mike Koleno identified three concrete benefits a VMware acquisition of Pivotal would deliver:
1. Brand Liberation for Pivotal’s Platform Portfolio
Pivotal’s brand was so closely tied to Cloud Foundry that its growing Kubernetes capabilities were largely invisible in the market. Placing both PCF and PKS under the VMware banner would let VMware present them as a complementary portfolio—a PaaS option and a KaaS option—rather than having them compete under a brand defined by one technology.
“Putting the Pivotal platform, whether Cloud Foundry or PKS, all of it behind VMware makes a ton of sense and alleviates that brand connection. It allows VMware to say we have a newer set of platforms that cater to different appetites.”
— Mike Koleno, CTO, Solstice
2. Access to VMware’s Enterprise Install Base
VMware’s customer base included a significant portion of the Fortune 500—organisations that had been running VMware infrastructure for over a decade. Most of those customers had not yet adopted cloud-native application development practices. With PCF and PKS available under the VMware umbrella, VMware’s salesforce could introduce both platforms to an enormous installed base already primed to trust VMware for infrastructure decisions.
3. A Simpler Competitive Story for PKS
In 2019, the managed Kubernetes market was intensely competitive, with offerings from AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and independent vendors. PKS had been a joint Pivotal–VMware project, which introduced complexity in go-to-market messaging. Folding it into a single VMware-owned product would simplify the sales motion and sharpen its competitive positioning.
The PaaS vs. KaaS Debate: Closer Together, Not Merged
Even with both platforms under one corporate roof, Koleno was careful to point out that Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes solve fundamentally different problems and would continue to attract different audiences.
“You’re going to always have the debate as to how much operational customisation you want to take on as part of the service and platform we provide to the application developers across the enterprise.”
— Mike Koleno, CTO, Solstice
The practical split he described works as follows:
- PaaS (Cloud Foundry) users want to abstract away as much infrastructure as possible. They prioritise developer experience and speed of delivery over operational control. Cloud Foundry handles routing, logging, health management and scaling automatically.
- KaaS (Kubernetes) users want the additional ~10% of configurability that a PaaS abstracts away—direct access to networking primitives, custom admission controllers, specialised storage classes and so on. They are willing to invest in the operational overhead that comes with that flexibility.
The convergence Koleno anticipated was at the platform level: Kubernetes becoming the shared runtime underneath Cloud Foundry, with PaaS ergonomics layered on top. The two platforms would not merge conceptually; rather, Cloud Foundry would become a higher-level abstraction over Kubernetes infrastructure.
VMware’s Broader Acquisition Strategy at the Time
The Pivotal acquisition, if completed, would have followed a string of strategically coherent VMware acquisitions in the cloud-native space, including CloudHealth (cloud cost management), Heptio (Kubernetes tooling and expertise, founded by original Kubernetes creators) and Bitnami (application packaging). Acquiring Pivotal would have represented the largest and most strategic move in that sequence, adding a full commercial PaaS and a co-owned KaaS to VMware’s portfolio in a single transaction.
What This Means for Engineering Teams Today
The 2019 VMware–Pivotal discussion remains relevant as a case study in platform strategy. The core engineering trade-offs it surfaced have not disappeared:
- Kubernetes has become the de facto container orchestration standard, and Cloud Foundry’s own runtime now runs on top of it in both the open-source and commercial distributions.
- Platform consolidation under a single vendor can reduce integration complexity and simplify procurement, but it introduces vendor lock-in risks that engineering leaders must weigh.
- The choice between a highly opinionated PaaS and a flexible orchestration layer is still an active decision for many enterprises undertaking digital transformation programmes.
- VMware’s subsequent acquisition by Broadcom in 2023 added another layer of strategic uncertainty for teams running Tanzu (the product line that emerged from the VMware–Pivotal integration).
For DevOps and platform engineering teams evaluating their options, the underlying principle Koleno articulated in 2019 remains sound: the right platform depends on how much operational complexity your organisation is prepared to own, and whether that complexity delivers meaningful business value for your specific workloads.