SUSE News Wrap-up from the Cloud Foundry Summit EU

When I wrote two weeks ago that SUSE will be busy at the Cloud Foundry Summit EU, I didn’t fully grasp exactly how busy we’d actually be. The Cloud Foundry Summit just seems to get bigger and better every year. With that comes more scheduled and impromptu meetings, discussions, and opportunities to learn and share. This was my first Summit in a couple of years, and it was a little overwhelming trying to keep up with everything that was happening as well as meeting with as many analysts and members of the press as possible to help spread our news around Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes.

The big news at the Summit, from SUSE’s point of view, was around the CF Containerization and Eirini projects, both of which SUSE is contributing to. Both projects are now part of the Cloud Foundry Foundation and they are key to integrating Cloud Foundry with Kubernetes.

CF Containerization was contributed by SUSE. Its roots go back several years when it was known as Fissile, and it has contributors other than SUSE, including IBM and SAP. In a nutshell, CF Containerization takes Cloud Foundry BOSH releases and converts them into Docker containers and corresponding Helm charts, ready to be installed into an existing Kubernetes. It’s what we use to build SUSE Cloud Application Platform today, and results in a smaller installation that requires no knowledge or installation of BOSH, instead leveraging an organization’s Kubernetes infrastructure and expertise.

Eirini was contributed by IBM and receives contributions from SUSE and SAP. Eirini’s goal is to offer a Cloud Foundry operator the choice of using native Kubernetes for container scheduling instead of Cloud Foundry’s Diego. This makes a ton of sense for SUSE Cloud Application Platform — because it already runs inside Kubernetes, adopting Eirini would remove what we believe is an unnecessary layer of complexity (using Diego in our product essentially means that we are running application containers inside of Diego containers). That’s why we announced at the Summit that we would be adopting Eirini for future versions of SUSE Cloud Application Platform. As soon as it’s fully baked and tested, we’ll be shipping it. My colleague, Ron Nunan, posted some additional background information on this last week.

As a product marketing wonk, part of my responsibility is helping to craft press releases for announcements and events and then hopefully convincing press and analysts to write about it. It turned out that our announcements at this Summit complemented the Cloud Foundry Foundation’s announcements very nicely, so several articles have been published so far (with more to come) where I didn’t even speak to the author! Thanks, Abby, Chip, Devin, and others at the Foundation for that!

Without further ado, here is a round-up of what was in the news:

SUSE Operates Across Communities to Deliver Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry Innovation to the Enterprise (SUSE press release)

Gerald Pfeifer, SUSE vice president of Products and Technology Programs, said, “Our approach is to identify leading open source technologies and bring them together in a way that makes sense for our customers. Today, that means bringing the unsurpassed productivity of the Cloud Foundry model together with modern Kubernetes infrastructure in SUSE Cloud Application Platform. This unique combination enables our customers to reduce complexity and become more agile to meet the changing demands of the digital economy.”

Cloud Foundry Focus on Interoperability Continues with Two New Projects Integrating Kubernetes (Cloud Foundry Foundation press release)

“Eirini and CF Containerization are the latest examples of the Cloud Foundry community’s approach to continuously exploring future evolutionary directions for the platform,” said Chip Childers, CTO, Cloud Foundry Foundation. “Developers have made it clear they need a simple, agile and flexible delivery method to push apps to production, which Cloud Foundry Application Runtime delivers. They also have multiple use cases in which deployment and management of software packaged into containers is critical. These new projects demonstrate additional approaches to combining Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry technologies.”

Cloud Foundry expands its support for Kubernetes (TechCrunch)

Clearly then, Kubernetes is becoming part and parcel of what the Cloud Foundry PaaS service will sit on top of and what developers will use to deploy the applications they write for it in the near future. At first glance, this focus on Kubernetes may look like it’s going to make Cloud Foundry superfluous, but it’s worth remembering that, at its core, the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime isn’t about infrastructure but about a developer experience and methodology that aims to manage the whole application development lifecycle.

SUSE Integrates Kubernetes with Cloud Foundry in Cloud Application Platform (ServerWatch)

Smithurst explained that SUSE containerized Cloud Foundry and deployed it into Kubernetes because there was an opportunity to increase Cloud Foundry’s efficiency by taking advantage of the popularity of Kubernetes, and eliminate the need for Cloud Foundry users to learn and use BOSH. BOSH is a lifecycle management tool that has long been a central component of Cloud Foundry.

Cloud Foundry embraces Kubernetes (ZDNet)

The overall goal is to give end-users a more consistent operational experience between application and container platforms. To further help this, additional projects that focus on shared logging and metrics and unified networking — via technologies like Istio and Open Service Broker API (OSBAPI)-compliant service catalog synchronization — are also on their way.

New Kubernetes-Native Implementation of Cloud Foundry is Coming to SUSE Cloud Application Platform (DevOps Digest)

This is SUSE’s latest move to provide Kubernetes users with the top cloud native DevOps experience by combining Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry technologies. SUSE Cloud Application Platform boosts developer productivity with automation that eliminates the need to build and manage container images.

Kubernetes won, and that’s OK. Cloud Foundry into the future… (Diversity Limited)

And whereas OpenStack was all about cloud infrastructure, since its inception, Cloud Foundry has been more about a developer experience and DevOps lifecycle management story. While OpenStack spent its early years telling anyone who would listen that it enabled users to compete with AWS, Cloud Foundry simply focused on its core message of developer agility – smart strategy, it seems.

Cloud Foundry Goes All-In With Kubernetes (DataCenter Knowledge)

What all this essentially means is that Cloud Foundry has joined the rest of the world in making Kubernetes an integral part of its container strategy.

Cloud Foundry announces new Kubernetes projects (Enterprise Times)

This is more than just container fever. The orchestration capabilities and smaller footprint of containers make it easier for companies to scale-out and scale-up their applications. Cloud Foundry has had a spectacular year in terms of new members and applications in its online marketplace. The latter is up tenfold in just 10 years. The problem that many developers faced was that they were unable to easily take advantage of Kubernetes despite last years announcement.

Cloud Foundry Foundation tightens Kubernetes integration with new projects (DevClass)

Eirini and CF Containerization are the newest additions to the portfolio of non-profit Cloud Foundry Foundation. Both projects should mainly help users to combine Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry if needed, which is something developers have been asking for for a while now.

Cloud Foundry Adopts a Pair of Kubernetes-Based Projects (SDxCentral)

Childers earlier this year indicated that the organization was working through gaining more confidence in the maturity and direction of Kubernetes and how it would fit into Cloud Foundry. “We don’t chase the shiny ball,” Childers said, noting that the organization was more focused on only adding components that will help developers.