Kubernetes has become a second passion—after Cloud Foundry—for Julian Fischer, Founder and CEO of anynines. While the world has largely shifted toward Kubernetes, a substantial customer base still relies on Cloud Foundry and requires commercial support and that’s a market anynines continues to serve, especially as some traditional players focus their attention elsewhere. Despite Kubernetes’ growing dominance, Fischer observes increasing interest in Cloud Foundry from two key segments: organizations using open source Cloud Foundry that are seeking well-tested distributions, and enterprises looking to reduce costs associated with commercial Cloud Foundry implementations.

“We’re seeing a spike in inquiries about Cloud Foundry—both the Kubernetes-based version and the classic stack,” Fischer noted. “There’s a lot of dynamic in the market, driven by teams using open source Cloud Foundry who want to free up internal capacity, as well as by organizations running commercial Cloud Foundry distributions who want to free themselves from the tyranny of enterprise pricing.”

Fischer emphasized that Cloud Foundry’s business case remains compelling for organizations with thousands of developers, particularly those transitioning to a “you build it, you run it” model. He directly challenged the notion that Kubernetes alone can deliver equivalent operational efficiency: “Cloud Foundry remains the most effective technology for supporting thousands of developers with on-demand self-service, multi-tenancy capabilities, and integration of data services. There is nothing right now in Kubernetes that does the same.”

Addressing Data Service Challenges with Klutch

One of the key challenges in the Kubernetes ecosystem is managing data services at scale. “If you have 100, 200, 300, or more Kubernetes clusters, the question is: how feasible is it for teams to run both applications and data services in an on-demand, self-service manner?”

anynines solved that problem with Klutch, an open source control plane designed to unify database and data service management across Kubernetes application clusters, cloud providers, and hybrid environments. Klutch offers a centralized approach to data service management to platform engineers managing many Kubernetes clusters across large development teams.

Fischer described Klutch as an integration layer that enables central management of metadata around data services, allowing developers to focus on application development rather than infrastructure management. “It allows you to have a remote control in your application clusters that gives you custom resource definitions (CRDs) for application developers to manage the lifecycle of their data services,” Fischer said. This approach centralizes metadata, providing a comprehensive overview of data service consumption across multiple clusters.

While Kubernetes operators running in application clusters might work for small teams, Fischer argued this approach doesn’t scale well for organizations with thousands of developers. Instead, Klutch enables:

• Centralized data service operations with specialized expert teams
• CRDs in application clusters for developer self-service
• Unified metadata management across environments
• Automated network path creation between applications and databases

The framework solves a critical integration issue in hybrid/multi-cloud scenarios, providing a central overview of all data service usage while abstracting away backend complexity.

Simplifying Developer Experience

A key theme throughout the interview was Fischer’s emphasis on reducing complexity for developers. He challenged the assumption that containerization alone creates a good developer experience: “Just because you never have to leave your Kubernetes cluster doesn’t mean it’s a developer-friendly experience. You need to eliminate the complexity so that the average developer doesn’t have to go through months of Amazon training just to understand all the behind-the-scenes intricacies needed to access something like an S3 bucket or an RDS database.”

This philosophy drives anynines’ approach to both their open source and commercial offerings. While Klutch itself is freely available under the Apache 2 license, anynines offers commercial data service automation backends for PostgreSQL, Redis, RabbitMQ and other databases, along with AWS integrations.

Open Source Strategy

Fischer clarified anynines’ open source approach with Klutch: “We believe that this is a major problem in the Kubernetes ecosystem when building application developer platforms, and therefore we donate the entire Klutch framework under the Apache 2 license.”

The framework is designed to simplify integrations with various backend systems, making it easier to implement than alternatives like Crossplane alone. Fischer emphasized that while they welcome partnerships with organizations looking to adopt Klutch, purchasing anynines’ commercial offerings is not a requirement.

anynines is focusing on proofs of concept with potential partners to demonstrate Klutch’s value before determining the best collaboration approach.

What’s in the pipeline

Fischer predicted significant evolution in the application platform space over the next two years: “Over the next 24 months, many application delivery stacks are likely to emerge within the Kubernetes ecosystem.”

Rather than seeing a single dominant technology emerge, he expects the market to segment based on different approaches and assumptions, with Cloud Foundry maintaining relevance alongside various Kubernetes-native solutions.

For platform engineers weighing technology choices, Fischer advocated for vendor-neutral APIs and open standards to maintain flexibility and mitigate risks associated with vendor lock-in – especially important in today’s environment of shifting politics and potential digital tariffs.

Guest: Julian Fischer (LinkedIn)
Company: anynines
Show: KubeStruck