The Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF) today released an update to its command-line interface (CLI) that will enable DevOps teams to build more granular and complex workflows spanning multiple processes across the open source platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment.
Announced at the Cloud Foundry North American Summit, version 7 of the Cloud Foundry CLI employs updates to the application programming interfaces (APIs) exposed via the Cloud Foundry PaaS to invoke package, droplet, build and process control resources while adding resources such as sidecars, manifests and deployments.
The updates to the CLI and associated APIs will make it possible to enable rolling application deployments, run multiple processes within the same container and add metadata to objects.
Chip Childers, executive director of the CFF, said most of the organizations that have adopted the Cloud Foundry PaaS are already fairly advanced when it comes to implementing best DevOps practices. The latest version of the CLI will make it possible to tighten DevOps feedback loops within the PaaS environment.
In general, CFF is positioning the Cloud Foundry PaaS environment as a common framework for building and deploying applications on traditional virtual machines and Kubernetes clusters. The CFF has launched an incubation project, dubbed KubeCF, that enables a virtual instance of the Cloud Foundry runtime to be deployed on Kubernetes. At the same time, the CFF has made available Project Eirini, another incubation project that enables the Cloud Foundry scheduler to be replaced by Kubernetes, and Project Quarks, which allows the CF Application Runtime to be packaged using containers.
The CFF has also launched Cloud Foundry for Kubernetes (cf-for-k8s), a more ambitious effort to replace the underpinnings of the PaaS environment with a Kubernetes foundation. That initiative should result in Cloud Foundry requiring much less IT infrastructure to be deployed. The CFF has also committed to embracing other cloud-native technologies such as the Istio service mesh.
As part of that effort, the Bosh framework that the CFF created to automate the deployment of its PaaS will also eventually be replaced by a framework optimized for Kubernetes environments.
Childers said it’s now clear Kubernetes will mature to the level required to support an enterprise-class application development environment. The opportunity now is for IT vendors such as VMware, SUSE and others to deliver an application development environment that makes developers more efficient than any other on cloud-native infrastructure, said Childers.
For example, VMware today is making available a public beta of the VMware Tanzu application service for Kubernetes based on the cf-for-k8s project.
Contributors to the CFF project are clearly trying to make up for lost time. Rival PaaS environments such as Red Hat OpenShift have long been integrated with Kubernetes. The CFF community, however, is betting more enterprise IT organizations will embrace Kubernetes once they discover various distributions of a PaaS environment they already rely on is available on that platform.
Whatever the path chosen, the one thing that is clear is the Cloud Foundry PaaS is about to become a lot more accessible to organizations that, no matter how great the developer experience, previously balked at its overall size.
