Pivotal Software announced an expansion of its implementation of the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment in addition to extending its support for Kubernetes to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud.
At its SpringOne Platform 2018 conference, Pivotal revealed that Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) can now extend a single instance of its distribution of the open source PaaS across multiple data centers. In addition, Pivotal is making it possible to automatically update the operating systems on which its PaaS is hosted, and added a more extensible user interface to its PCF Healthwatch monitoring tool.
What’s more, Pivotal announced that Pivotal Container Service (PKS), its implementation of Kubernetes, now can be deployed on EC2 instances of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud. PKS is currently based on version 1.11 of Kubernetes that has been packaged with a software-defined runtime for spinning up clusters known as Kubo, developed under the auspices of the Cloud Computing Foundation (CFF), which also oversees Cloud Foundry. PKS was developed in collaboration with VMware, which is a sister company of Pivotal operating under the same Dell Technologies umbrella, and the latest version adds the ability to configure a namespace or cluster to emit logs to a specific destination, such as VMware vRealize Log Insight, without operator intervention.
Richard Seroter, senior director of product for Pivotal, said Pivotal and VMware are collaborating to make Kubernetes clusters more accessible to enterprise IT organizations that typically don’t have engineers available to manage IT operations. By combining automation frameworks from VMware and Pivotal, the expectation is that PKS will gain more traction as IT organizations evaluate which flavor of Kubernetes to deploy in a production environment, he added. A recent research report published by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) would suggest that strategy is starting to gain traction.
Pivotal apparently is pursuing a dual application development strategy. The first is based on a PCF framework that is highly prescriptive in terms of how applications should be built and deployed. The second is a more flexible container-as-a-service (CaaS) platform based on Kubernetes.
In general, organizations that have invested in Cloud Foundry to deploy a PaaS are not likely abandon it in favor of a container platform overnight. But Pivotal and the CFF are under some pressure to be more aggressive in unifying Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes: There already are several instances of Cloud Foundry that run on top of Kubernetes, and Pivotal Software revealed earlier this month that it missed Wall Street’s expectations for billing revenue in its most recent quarter by 25 percent.
It may take a while for the relationship between Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes to become more firmly established in the minds of IT professionals. But there are certainly no shortage of options when it comes to developing modern applications—there will be more than a few organizations employing multiple frameworks for building these applications for many years to come. The real issue may lie in deriving value from those investments.
Survey findings published this week by Pivotal revealed that only 39 percent of global organizations are deploying code on a continuous, hourly or daily basis and only 40 percent deploy code on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis. The survey also found that only 35 percent of developers’ time is spent writing code for new products or features to deliver value, as opposed to maintenance or fixing old code. Also, one-third of U.S. respondents (33 percent) reported delaying application releases more than 11 times due to security concerns, compared to 21 percent globally. Clearly, there is much more DevOps work to be done.
— Mike Vizard
