Cloud Foundry Foundation, home of the most widely-adopted open source cloud technologies in the world, opened its North American Cloud Foundry Summit in the Boston Convention Center today with news from organizations including Alibaba, Cloud.gov, IBM, Resilient Scale, SUSE and more. The 2018 North America Summit is taking place from April 18-20 and is supported by Platinum sponsors Dynatrace, IBM, Pivotal and VMware.

"We are excited to host Cloud Foundry Summit on the east coast for the first time," said Abby Kearns, Executive Director, Cloud Foundry Foundation. "I'm personally looking forward to spending time with our community and hearing from our end users, as well as sharing our news, including the results from our User Survey, new Certified Providers and new members."

The Foundation shared highlights including:

Cloud Foundry 1H 2018 User Survey

The Cloud Foundry Foundation released its second semi-annual User Survey whose findings show Cloud Foundry usage among developers grew across industries and across the globe - with more than half of user respondents identifying as "new users." According to user respondents, 13 percent of Cloud Foundry Application Runtime (CFAR) users currently use Cloud Foundry Container Runtime (CFCR). CFCR, which is Kubernetes on BOSH, was launched after the 2017 User Report and announced at the Cloud Foundry EU Summit 2017 six months ago.

Alibaba:

Alibaba Group, the largest cloud infrastructure provider in China and among the three largest globally, announced it has joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation as a Gold Member.

Cloud Foundry is now available on Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group. By creating a Cloud Provider Interface (CPI) for Cloud Foundry BOSH, Alibaba Cloud now has access to both Cloud Foundry Application Runtime (CFAR) and Cloud Foundry Container Runtime (CFCR) workloads. This integration ensures seamless interaction between Alibaba Cloud and Cloud Foundry.

Cloud.gov

Cloud.gov has become a Cloud Foundry Certified Platform, making it the first government agency to offer a certified platform based on the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime. Run by 18F, Cloud.gov joins Atos, Huawei, IBM, Pivotal, SAP, Swisscom and the newly announced SUSE as a certified provider. Learn more here.

Cloud Foundry Foundation announced it has added nearly 5,000 entries to its web- based marketplace "The Foundry" including new training, partners, and services/ integrations. This is nearly a 900 percent increase in entries since the marketplace was announced at the 2017 EU Summit. The Foundry is a web-based marketplace for those seeking a technology solution, learning opportunities, or help with the transition to cloud- native development.

Foundation member news includes:

SUSE becomes an official Certified Platform of Cloud Foundry
SUSE Cloud Application Platform has been designated a Certified Cloud Foundry distribution by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. The newly certified SUSE Cloud Application Platform brings the advanced productivity of the Cloud Foundry model to Kubernetes, a modern container infrastructure that is rapidly becoming the de facto standard. One of two certified Cloud Foundry software offerings, SUSE's is the only distribution that is delivered via 100 percent open source software. Built with SUSE Linux Enterprise and backed directly by SUSE, it is a practical solution for organizations pursuing an engineering-led approach to application delivery transformation. SUSE is also releasing functional enhancements to SUSE Cloud Application Platform that will speed customer time to value on public clouds and help users protect or migrate their Cloud Foundry environment.

IBM:
IBM is launching an experimental offering that will help developers build cloud apps with enhanced security and stability, while ensuring flexibility in different environments. This enables companies to run Cloud Foundry in a dedicated environment, while natively integrating with other IBM Cloud services such as AI, Blockchain, IoT and data tools.

Mendix and IBM:
Mendix and IBM announced a reseller agreement in which IBM will resell and support the Mendix low-code platform on the IBM Cloud. This partnership will allow IBM developers to use Mendix's speed and agility to create next gen apps that can quickly integrate with and consume AI, data analytics, and IoT services from the IBM Cloud.

Resilient Scale:
Resilient Scale has launched https://learn.rscale.io, an immersive e-learning platform. Resilient Scale is the co-author of the official Cloud Foundry Foundation developer training, authorized training partner of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, and the technical advisor for the Cloud Foundry Developer Certification. Learn more and preview the course at https://learn.rscale.io.

Dynatrace:
Dynatrace announced it is bringing its fully automated, full-stack monitoring power to the Kubernetes-based Cloud Foundry Container Runtime. Organizations can now benefit from integrated end-to-end monitoring for their Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes multi-cloud environments with Dynatrace's BOSH add-on.

TIBCO:
TIBCO announced added support for Cloud Foundry Container Runtime and Pivotal Cloud Foundry 2.x on BusinessWorksTM Container Edition, allowing customers to leverage Kubernetes on Cloud Foundry, along with the existing application runtime for cloud-native integration applications.

ITQ:
ITQ announced it has ported Cloud Foundry to Raspberry PI with ARM CPU, deployed by Cloud Foundry BOSH.

Altoros:
Altoros announced its Cloud Foundry engineers will offer Kubernetes training courses, covering fundamentals and a deep dive, to enhance developer skill sets.
Cloud Foundry Foundation has hosted a diversity event at every Summit and 2018 will be no exception. Sponsored by Google and Cognizant, the Diversity Luncheon will focus on the gender pay gap with a screening of Eighty Twenty: The Gender Pay Gap Exposed, the first episode of docuseries The Chasing Grace Project, written and directed by Jennifer Cloer, co- founder of Wicked Flicks Productions. Following the episode will be a Q+A with Kearns and Cloer.

In addition to day-long themes, Cloud Foundry Summit offers topic-based tracks, including a full-day track on government use cases of Cloud Foundry as well as a brand new track on Containers and Serverless, which includes sessions on Cloud Foundry Container Runtime, Serverless frameworks, Function-as-a-Service and more.

Highlights include:

• A panel on ecosystem, moderated by TechCrunch's Frederic Lardinois.
• User Day, a full-day Unconference exclusively for Cloud Foundry users to talk shop and trade best practices.
  
• A free Hackathon, sponsored by VMware, for developers. Prizes awarded to top three teams and first place winners announced on stage during Friday morning keynotes.
• Hands-on training workshops for all levels (add-on during registration).
  

Cloud Foundry Foundation's Kearns and CTO Chip Childers will host discussions that map to the day-long themes "Ecosystem" and "Interoperability." The interactive discussion-based style stimulates critical thinking, draws out innovative ideas, focuses more on technical specifics and highlights user stories.

"SAP is a top contributor to the community and we continue to bring our unique experience in delivering business services and enterprise-ready apps to Cloud Foundry," said Björn Goerke, SAP Cloud Platform president and chief technology officer, SAP. "Additionally, we are growing the open source community with recently sponsored Cloud Foundry Days in Bangalore, India and Sofia, Bulgaria. With machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), in-memory data management and big data services, all supported by the Cloud Foundry environment, SAP Cloud Platform simplifies the development of cloud-native applications on the broadest choice of public cloud infrastructure providers."

Find the full schedule here: https://cloudfoundry.org/event_subpages/na2018-schedule/.