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Guest: Julian Fischer (LinkedIn)
Company: anynines (Twitter)
Show: Newsroom

The Cloud Foundry Foundation hosted the 2023 Cloud Foundry Day last month in Heidelberg, Germany. Attended by member companies, tech community members, and end-users, it was a day of sharing Cloud Foundry stories and experiences. In this episode of TFiR: Newsroom, anynines CEO and Founder Julian Fischer shares the highlights of the event as well as his insights on Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes to date.

Event topics of discussion:

  • The classic Cloud Foundry, which is still being used at scale. Existing customers that have the VM-based Cloud Foundry in the classic stack are still very confident that this is the right solution for them.
  • Cloud Foundry for Kubernetes appears to conquer a different niche. It is smaller, allows one to download and install Cloud Foundry, get that “cf push” user experience, use buildpacks, and all the wonderful aspects of Cloud Foundry but at a smaller infrastructure footprint.
  • Data service automation is still an issue for many companies who are working on managing data at scale. 
  • Developing application development platforms with Kubernetes is becoming more important. Some are doing experiments to run databases on Kubernetes while others are sticking with the idea of virtual machines.
  • Cross-integration becomes an issue if you have some services on virtual machines as well as data services on Kubernetes.
  • How to consume Kubernetes services from a Cloud Foundry.
  • Depth of automation. The more mature technologies have been about pushing the edge of automation even further to get those edge cases covered.

On Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes:

  • Fischer describes the event as very uplifting. The “Kubernetes trauma” that has affected the Cloud Foundry community for a while has healed. The mix of new participants and old members is giving him momentum to participate in Cloud Foundry even more. 
  • OpenStack, as a community, has grown and has gotten a lot of publicity. To some degree, it has lost visibility in the broader tech community. That does not mean it is gone, though. OpenStack is still in many customer accounts to this day. It is established as a technology.
  • Same with Cloud Foundry: just because people don’t talk about it the way they did in 2016 doesn’t mean it is gone. It’s there and it’s solid.
  • Fischer believes that Kubernetes has cannibalized many different movements. Examples: 1) It got momentum from the OpenStack movement, converting those people who were looking for an infrastructure abstraction layer, those who didn’t want to deal with hardware and proprietary infrastructure automation API. 2) Docker pivoted from being a platform company to having container technology, but it failed to establish a container orchestration tool for broader scale. Kubernetes got the position in the race to use Docker, but still owns the orchestration part of it.
  • Kubernetes is not about deployments or stateful sets or replica sets. Today, it is about being the framework for writing declarative automation. Kubernetes became so much that it is hard to say what it is in one sentence. Kubernetes is an ecosystem. People need to understand that it becomes what you need it to become, depending on a particular context.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.

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