Cloud Foundry Foundation Highlights Community and Harmonizes With Kubernetes

This year marks five since the Foundation was established to hold the intellectual property of the open source Cloud Foundry technology and oversee the governance of the project. For five years, we’ve supported the development of dozens of brilliant projects via our Project Management Committees, and accepted many to become incubating projects of the Foundation. We’ve worked closely with our community of contributors and committers to continue to evolve the Cloud Foundry technologies to meet the rigorous standards of daily use and to provide the best possible experience to developers working in the enterprise.

The first five years

To better understand what the Cloud Foundry Foundation can do for SAP legacy customers, let's take a look at some of the highlights of the past five years and what the foundation will be moving this year.

2015: The Foundation launches the Cloud Foundry Certified Provider program, the industry’s only certification program designed to establish reliable portability across PaaS products in multi-vendor, multi-cloud environments.

2016: The Foundation launches the Open Service Broker API project in collaboration with Fujitsu, Google, IBM, Pivotal, Red Hat and SAP, and announces OCI and CNI support in Cloud Foundry Application Runtime.

2017: The Foundation announces Cloud Foundry Container Runtime, allowing developers to deploy containers using Kubernetes and BOSH; the release of WinC; and Envoy and Istio integration into the project. The Foundry, the world’s largest open source marketplace, is made publicly available.

2018The Foundation launches Eirini and Project Quarks in order to further integrate Kubernetes with Cloud Foundry technologies, as well as the integration of Containerd.

2019: Eirini is supported by all Cloud Foundry Certified Providers less than one year after its launch, with multiple technical previews in the market. The Foundation rolls out Version 2.0 of the Cloud Foundry Certified Developer exam.

2020: The Foundation announces it has accepted as an incubating project KubeCF, an open source distribution of Cloud Foundry Application Runtime designed to run on top of Kubernetes.

The Future of Cloud Foundry

You may have noticed a trend in the last few years: much of the technical work our community has done has been to incorporate Kubernetes into Cloud Foundry technologies. Kubernetes skyrocketed to popularity and has become the standard way to orchestrate containers, but it lacks a developer experience. That’s why we are committed to bringing the Cloud Foundry developer experience to Kubernetes.

We’ve reached a pivot point at the Foundation, shifting our focus to the evolution of the technology to a Kubernetes-based platform and working with the Cloud Foundry community to facilitate and support that shift. The Cloud Foundry community has spent time in the past two years integrating Kubernetes into the platform in a number of ways, including shared networking, authentication, logging and a shared services catalog. The Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes integrations give end users the simplicity, control, and speed they have come to rely on from Cloud Foundry with the flexibility and modularity of Kubernetes.

As the market moves, Cloud Foundry moves with it, adding in new functionality and remaining flexible in order to meet the needs of our diverse user community. This movement towards a Kubernetes-based platform is key to advancing the community forward into the cloud native future.