Cloud Foundry vs. Kubernetes is not a clear-cut choice as one might think.

anynines is a company focused on building and operating modern application developer platforms. The company has been monitoring Kubernetes for some time now and has discovered that a lot of people are starting to wonder if it’s time to migrate to a Kubernetes-based platform, or even moving Cloud Foundry workloads to Kubernetes. With many clients from different industries, anynines is often faced with the question: “When is the right time to migrate?” Or some clients simply make that decision on their own (without consulting anynines) and launch internal projects in the attempt to migrate to Kubernetes.

Commenting on those migrations, Julian Fischer, CEO of anynines, says, “…It was surprising. Because of the popularity of Kubernetes, one may think that it’s a technology that’s been used for years and the ecosystem is thriving. There are many interesting products available, there are commercial vendors and countless of them. So one may think such a migration would go just easy as pie, but it turned out not to be the case.”

Some of those projects (that were so enthusiastically started) have been abandoned. According to Fischer, “…This doesn’t say anything bad about Kubernetes. It’s a fantastic piece of technology. But it says something about Cloud Foundry and its maturity, especially where those Cloud Foundry environments got very large.”

When asked about those migrations, Fischer went on to discuss the decision of migrating workloads to either Kubernetes or a Cloud Foundry environment. “…If you have an organization with, let’s say, 5,000 tenants and many applications, Cloud Foundry provides you with the ability to run these workloads in a single Cloud Foundry environment. Now, if you take such an environment, and you want to migrate it to Kubernetes, the question would be, “Is a single Kubernetes cluster able to run these workloads?” Another question, according to Fischer, is “Whether or not Kubernetes authentication or namespaces’ concepts are strong enough to map organizations in a one-to-one manner?”

In the end, Fischer says, “…It’s not that these customers don’t adapt to Kubernetes. It’s just that the idea of eradicating Cloud Foundry environments in favor of Kubernetes didn’t work out according to their expectations.”

As to the future of Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry, “Kubernetes is going to be a very interesting direction for Cloud Foundry, and they will meld together at some point. So let’s see how the dynamics will evolve,” quips Fischer.