The most important open source component: The community

Cloud Foundry is an important open source component for SAP legacy customers. In 2020, it will be five years since the associated foundation was established. It was to manage the intellectual property of the open source Cloud Foundry technology and manage the project.

During these five years, our Project Management Committees have supported the development of dozens of projects, many of which have been accepted as incubation projects.

We have worked closely with our community to evolve Cloud Foundry technology so that it not only meets the standards and requirements of everyday use, but also provides enterprise developers with the tools they need.

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 is launching the Cloud Foundry Certified Provider program, the industry's only certification for reliably porting PaaS products across heterogeneous multicloud 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 for the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime.

2017: The Foundation releases the Cloud Foundry Container Runtime, which enables developers to deploy containers using Kubernetes and Bosh. WinC is released and Envoy and Istio are integrated into the project. The Foundry, the world's largest open source marketplace, opens its doors to everyone.

2018: Foundation launches Eirini and Project Quarks to further integrate Kubernetes with Cloud Foundry technologies. Containerd will also be included.

2019: Less than a year after its launch, Eirini is supported by all Cloud Foundry Certified providers, and there are several Technical Previews on the market. The Foundation launches version 2.0 of the Cloud Foundry Certified Developer exam.

2020: The foundation is accepting KubeCF as an incubation project, an open-source distribution of the Cloud Foundry application runtime running on Kubernetes.

The Future of Cloud Foundry

You've probably noticed the trend over the last couple of years as well: most of the work our community has put into integrating Kubernetes with Cloud Foundry.

Kubernetes quickly became popular and has become the widely accepted standard for orchestrating containers, but it lacks good tools for doing so. That's why we see it as our mission to connect Kubernetes with Cloud Foundry's development environment.

We have reached the point with Foundation where we are shifting our focus to the evolution of a Kubernetes-based platform. Together with the Cloud Foundry community, we are working to make this shift easy and successful for everyone.

The Cloud Foundry community has been integrating Kubernetes into the platform in a variety of ways over the past two years, including shared networking, authentication, logging and the shared services catalog.

For users, the integration of Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes combines the familiar structuredness, control and speed of Cloud Foundry with the flexibility and modularity of Kubernetes.

Cloud Foundry responds to the market and introduces new features, but remains flexible. Our momentum towards a Kubernetes-based platform is the key to unlocking the cloudnative future for the community and benefiting existing SAP customers.