Cloud Foundry Summit 2021: Reducing The Open Source Chaos

“We’ve always aimed to reduce the chaos in the open source community,” said Chip Childers, Executive Director of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, in a preliminary press conference. “We have a long history of our community having to build components because they didn’t exist as a general purpose tool. We always made it a focus that if we integrate these things, the experience is as seamless as possible. Of course, there’s limits to that, and in a lot of cases, you rely on the underlying infrastructure for seamless integration. Which is why it’s important to us to build releases that are thoughtful curations of components.” This sentiment can be felt in all announcements coming out of the event.

cf-for-k8s v5

“The rush of developers onto Kubernetes was a bit of a red herring,” said Chip Childers. “Kubernetes is an infrastructure, similar to virtual machines in many ways. It is absolutely the next version of infrastructure, it has a lot of potential – but it’s infrastructure. The developers that choose to interact directly with Kubernetes are finding that they need to do an awful lot of work to get from their code to running software. Making developers’ lives easier on top of that infrastructure is a priority.” The latest version of cf-for-k8s (v5), including core Cloud Foundry component updates, is supposed to be the next step towards that goal.

The solution now supports kpack v0.3.1 and Istio v1.9.5 and is capable of being installed on Kubernetes clusters running v1.18 through v1.20. The project significantly improved the upgrade process for underlying Istio service mesh networking components and has been updated to support the latest generation of Paketo buildpacks.

Technical Oversight Committee

The Foundation also announced the formation of a Technical Oversight Committee (TOC), significantly reorganizing how the Cloud Foundry open-source community operates. “Our community identified that not being assigned full-time to the project was an inhibitor to be involved in the decision-making process. This is why we decided to overhaul the rules. This may seem trivial, but it has a huge impact on the community,” promises Chip Childers.

The TOC will take the place of the former Project Management Committee (PMC) and is responsible for the oversight, direction, and delivery of technical aspects of the Cloud Foundry projects and working groups. Most importantly, the role of the TOC will be to enable the user community to do good work in an open and transparent way, while helping to maintain the integrity of the project used by so many organizations around the world.

Keeping up with the members

Some foundation members had announcements of their own. For example, Minio announced the availability of its object storage suite on RedHat’s OpenShift platform and Marketplace. With the addition of a certified Red Hat solution, Minio is now available on every major Kubernetes distribution, as well as every major cloud provider.

SAP unveiled the general availability of the new BOSH stemcell to the Cloud Foundry community. Previously, the stemcell was created, maintained, and released by a different company. As this company decided to discontinue its work on the stemcells, SAP offered to continue supporting the community with a new stemcell offering and delivering security updates to thousands of virtual machines (VMs).

VMware has been actively engaged in the development of the new CFF technical governance structure, which lists transparency and the inclusiveness of community activity among its most important goals. It has also led the development of new Cloud Foundry features, including support for HTTP/2 routing.