The Cloud
Foundry Foundation, home to open source projects simplifying the cloud
native developer experience on Kubernetes, announced from the virtual Cloud
Foundry European Summit the release of version 1.0 of cf-for-k8s, the
release of version 2.5 of KubeCF, and the release of version 4.2 of Stratos.
The new release rollouts reinforce the continued momentum of the Cloud Foundry
community to ensure Cloud Foundry’s architecture includes the most modern
cloud-native infrastructure technology. Project teams have spent the last few
years evolving the Cloud Foundry architecture to include Kubernetes and other
cloud native open source projects, all with the goal of bringing the Cloud
Foundry developer experience to Kubernetes clusters everywhere.
“Today, our community unveils new project releases that mark a turning point
for the Cloud Foundry project. Since its inception, the Cloud Foundry
community’s mission has been to make developers’ lives easier. This has never
been more important, as the rise of Kubernetes to become the de facto standard
for modern infrastructure has brought both powerful possibilities and
challenging complexities to developers,” said Chip Childers, executive
director, Cloud Foundry Foundation. “Thanks to the innovation of the open
source community, Cloud Foundry will continue to evolve to give you the full
best-in-class Cloud Foundry developer experience wherever you use Kubernetes.”
cf-for-k8s v1.0
Launched in April, cf-for-k8s is a Kubernetes-native distribution
of Cloud Foundry. The project blends the Cloud Foundry developer API with
popular Kubernetes technologies including Istio, Envoy, Fluentd, and Kubernetes
itself. Developers can install cf-fork-8s in less than 10 minutes on any
conformant Kubernetes cluster, and is lightweight enough to be deployed on a
laptop. Some key features of cf-for-k8s include:
- The Cloud Foundry developer API, including support for the new CF
CLI v7 - App staging with kpack
and Paketo Buildpacks - Encrypted communication with Istio and Envoy
- Lifecycle management with Carvel
tools like kapp, ytt, and kbuild - Metrics, log, and event collection with Fluentd
The community has recently added these capabilities to cf-for-k8s v1.0:
- Encrypted in-flight communication
- Support for cf bind-service, cf marketplace and other commands related to the
Open Service Broker API - Support for a range of developer frameworks (Java, Node, Go, .NET Core, etc.)
- Cloud Controller API (CAPI) refactored to use a container registry as its
data store
KubeCF v2.5
Donated to the Cloud Foundry Foundation as an incubating
project in March, KubeCF is an open source distribution of Cloud Foundry for
Kubernetes, packaged as a Helm chart. KubeCF runs all the same software that
runs in “traditional” VM-based Cloud Foundry clusters, and the developer
experience is identical. From a platform operator’s perspective, KubeCF is
deployed and configured using Helm. The new features in KubeCF v2.5 include:
- Production-ready Eirini, supported in commercial distributions of Certified
Cloud Foundry, providing users improved stability and closer feature parity
with Diego. Eirini significantly reduces the architectural complexity of Cloud
Foundry on Kubernetes because user applications run as pods rather than as
containers within a Diego pod. In combination with the EiriniX extension
framework, Eirini opens the door for more integrations with tools from the
Kubernetes ecosystem. - Container-to-Container Networking and Multi-cluster App Scheduling for Diego
- Enhancements and bug fixes: https://github.com/cloudfoundry-incubator/kubecf/releases
Stratos v4.2
Stratos is a web-based management console, initially intended to manage Cloud
Foundry clusters, aimed at fulfilling the needs of both developers and
administrators. This new release adds support for both native Kubernetes
clusters and Helm chart repositories. It provides a visual user interface to
complement the corresponding CLI tools, allowing end users to perform many of
their day-to-day tasks straight from the web browser. The new features in
Stratos v4.2 include:
- Kubernetes and Helm features are now available in the upstream release
(previously only available in SUSE Cloud Application Platform) - Helm charts: Users can browse any Helm chart repository including embedded
documentation, set required deployment values directly in the UI, and deploy
applications to Kubernetes with a single click - Workloads (Helm releases): Users can assess application status more rapidly
with a graphical workload viewer that enables rapid understanding of workload
resources, relationships, health, and more. - Ensure robust Kubernetes cluster configuration with cluster and resource
analysis tools that detect misconfigurations based on commonly accepted best
practices. The embedded Popeye
analyzer improves security, performance, and availability in the cluster.
Analysis results can be viewed as a report, or as a visual overlay in the
workloads viewer for a clear picture of where the cluster is not up to
standard.
All projects will be discussed in detail at Cloud
Foundry EU Summit on October 21 and 22, 2020.
