The Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF) continues to evolve its platform offerings while maintaining its commitment to developer-friendly experiences in an increasingly complex Kubernetes landscape. During a recent interview at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, Ram Iyengar, Chief Evangelist at CFF, shared insights into the foundation’s current projects and strategic direction.

Foundation Maintains Stability Amid Growth

The Cloud Foundry Foundation demonstrates what Iyengar describes as “rock solid stability” in its governance model and open source contributions. This stability has enabled renewed interest in several key projects, particularly Cloud Native Buildpacks and Stratos, the latter potentially expanding its role from a Cloud Foundry UI to a broader Kubernetes interface.

Concourse Joins the Foundation Family

A significant development is the donation of Concourse, a continuous delivery (CD) tool, to the Cloud Foundry Foundation. Despite its Pivotal heritage, Concourse has maintained strong community adoption due to its visual pipeline modeling and streamlined approach to CI/CD. Iyengar notes that teams using Concourse tend to remain loyal, highlighting its niche effectiveness in serving developer-centric workflows.

Korifi Advances Enterprise Readiness

The Korifi project has made substantial progress in achieving feature parity with traditional Cloud Foundry platforms. Recent updates include enhanced support for managed services and improved service lifecycle management. These developments make Korifi increasingly attractive for enterprise use cases within the Kubernetes ecosystem, helping bridge the gap between Kubernetes’ technical capabilities and enterprise requirements.

Buildpacks Experience Unprecedented Adoption

Perhaps the most striking success story is the grassroots adoption of Buildpacks. The project has attracted attention at industry events, with contributions from Heroku and Google. Enterprise users like Bloomberg and ING are actively implementing Buildpacks, highlighting its cross-sector versatility.

Buildpacks’ adaptability is evident in emerging areas like MLOps and AI-related workflows, demonstrating the project’s ability to serve a wide array of developer needs beyond traditional application deployment.

Addressing the Kubernetes Complexity Challenge

Iyengar acknowledges a common sentiment among developers: while Kubernetes is powerful, it often feels overwhelmingly complex. The “Wild West” nature of the cloud native ecosystem offers vast choice but limited coherence.

Cloud Foundry’s approach provides what Iyengar calls a “paved path” experience. This philosophy enables teams to begin with structured workflows while retaining the flexibility to customize. It bridges the gap between simplicity and enterprise-grade sophistication, offering a more manageable on-ramp to cloud native practices.

Strategic Position in Cloud Native Landscape

The Cloud Foundry Foundation’s strategy reflects a broader industry trend: balancing innovation with usability. Rather than positioning itself in opposition to Kubernetes, the foundation frames its projects as complementary components that enhance the developer experience. This vision aligns with recognition from CNCF, where Cloud Foundry was acknowledged by Chris Aniszczyk during KubeCon as one of the original contributors when Kubernetes began its journey a decade ago.

Looking Forward

As both the Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry communities mature, the synergy between platforms becomes more valuable. Organizations can leverage Cloud Foundry’s developer-centric approach while scaling toward Kubernetes-native solutions as needs evolve.

The foundation’s ability to maintain project stability while encouraging innovation showcases the resilience of open source governance in modern enterprise software. With continued momentum in Buildpacks adoption and Korifi development, the Cloud Foundry Foundation is well-positioned to serve as a vital bridge between traditional platform-as-a-service expectations and the demands of today’s cloud native realities.

Interview Transcript

Host: Swapnil Bhartiya

Guest: Ram Iyengar, Chief Evangelist at Cloud Foundry Foundation

Swapnil Bhartiya: Hi, this is Swapnil Bhartiya, and we are here at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. Today we have with us once again Ram Iyengar, Chief Evangelist at the Cloud Foundry Foundation. Ram, it’s great to have you on the show.

Ram Iyengar: Hi Swapnil, always a pleasure to be with you. The pleasure is all mine.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Give us an update on the Cloud Foundry Foundation. How are things? How is adoption? What are the projects?

Ram Iyengar: The Cloud Foundry Foundation enjoys rock-solid stability. There’s been very good progress in terms of keeping the Cloud Foundry projects alive, keeping them going, maintaining governance, and ensuring open source contributions continue. There’s renewed interest in some of our projects, like Buildpacks and Stratos, which was the UI for Cloud Foundry and could soon become a UI for Kubernetes as well.

There’s also a new donation to the Cloud Foundry Foundation: Concourse, a continuous delivery tool. I wouldn’t say it’s rising from the ashes, because what I like about Concourse is that it’s a very sticky tool. Teams that try Concourse just love it and don’t move to any other CD tool. It serves very niche and important use cases that developers have for their CD workflows. It lets you visualize pipelines and build them, with all these nifty features. Obviously, it has Pivotal pedigree, but right now it’s an open source project within the foundation.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Can you give us an update on Korifi? What’s really going on there? Last time we spoke, it was about Korifi getting support for managed services.

Ram Iyengar: We’ve refined support for services and done more with the service lifecycle. Previously, while we were able to create and manage some services, we now have the ability to do much more. There’s work we’ve done that’s obviously boring to talk about but important for developers, like log cache and many different related features. Korifi is gaining more parity with Cloud Foundry, which makes it more appealing for enterprise use cases and general-purpose use cases within the Kubernetes ecosystem.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Can you give us some insights on Buildpacks?

Ram Iyengar: Buildpacks is probably the biggest draw to our booth here at KubeCon. Tons of people recognize the project, like what they see, and come tell us they’re using Buildpacks in particular ways. The grassroots adoption and traction among the developer community has been fantastic.

It’s an open ecosystem with help from Heroku folks, and people at Google are evangelizing Buildpacks. End-user companies like Bloomberg and ING are talking about Buildpacks extensively. Whether on this side of the pond or in the US, there’s significant interest in the project—not just consuming existing Buildpacks, but customizing them for very specific developer experiences.

Interesting use cases we keep hearing about include Buildpacks for MLOps and AI-related workflows. It’s great that Buildpacks can tackle such a wide variety of use cases. It’s nice to see people contributing some of these back to the open ecosystem, though obviously in some cases they don’t. Just the consumption across all these different areas is something we never imagined was possible, and it’s a testament to the open ecosystem.

Swapnil Bhartiya: What kind of use cases still exist for Cloud Foundry where folks are using it as their foundation?

Ram Iyengar: Many people who come to our booth are happy Cloud Foundry users but somewhat unhappy Kubernetes users. I shouldn’t be saying this at KubeCon, but there’s some truth to it. They all want a more sophisticated experience with Kubernetes. They’re tired of wrangling with spanners and making things work. The overall developer experience around Kubernetes offers so much promise and choice, but it’s kind of like the Wild West at the moment.

Many people are converging toward the idea that a paved-path experience is somewhat better than keeping everything completely open. What I like about the current state of Cloud Foundry, the CNCF ecosystem, and Kubernetes is that you can start with a paved path and build your own as you go along, customizing something bespoke for your team and workflows, because there are so many options available. That’s how I’d like to see this community mature.

Cloud Foundry, with the Korifi project, offers a path for the cloud native community. If things need to take a different direction from there, that’s fine, but it’s a good starting point for many teams, and that’s what we’re seeing more and more.

Swapnil Bhartiya: We’ve talked about Korifi and name changes. I remember the early days when there were many name changes between Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry. Are you getting queries from folks looking at moving to Kubernetes? You’ve talked about developer experience—the CF push magic. Kubernetes wasn’t known for that; it was totally the opposite. How is this benefiting the larger Kubernetes ecosystem?

Ram Iyengar: While Kubernetes is amazing as a tool, and the CNCF ecosystem around it is fantastic at pushing boundaries and making Kubernetes one of the most complete and comprehensive platforms, it’s hard to pick one path for your developers. You want them to use Kubernetes and consume cloud native projects, but you also want them to do it in three weeks, not three years.

Many teams working with the cloud native ecosystem could benefit from something like Cloud Foundry, which provides a good way to start consuming these CNCF projects without worrying about cobbling them together, ensuring they work together, and dealing with all the complexity.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Ram, once again, thank you so much for joining me and giving us updates on Cloud Foundry. As usual, I look forward to chatting with you again.

Ram Iyengar: Thank you so much, Swapnil. This is special because on the first day of the keynote, Chris Aniszczyk mentioned that Cloud Foundry was one of the original contributors in the room when Kubernetes started. We’ve all come so far in 10 years, and it’s nice for both communities to cross-pollinate and work well together. We’re really looking forward to keeping the momentum going. It’s nice to be here, nice to be talking about it, and thanks so much for having me.