Guest: Ram Iyengar (LinkedIn)
Organization: Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF) (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

The Cloud Foundry Foundation owns several projects for the Kubernetes community, overlapping with bigger themes like platform engineering and simplifying Kubernetes for the end user. Two projects that Cloud Foundry wants to shine the spotlight on are Cloud Foundry Korifi, a Cloud Foundry abstraction on Kubernetes, and Paketo Buildpacks, an implementation of the cloud-native build pack specification.

The Korifi project is progressing with the community building lots of improvements in terms of getting Korifi closer to engineering teams who want to try it before they adopt it. One of their improvements has been to solve the problem of local installs with a sophisticated local installer where you can get Korifi running on a client cluster running locally. Support for Docker-based containers is also just being announced.

While many people in the community have said they have tried Cloud Foundry, one of their comments was always that they wish it existed on Kubernetes, which now it does. The big vendors that use Cloud Foundry are reporting a lot of usage and they are starting to see individuals and hobbyists start to use Korifi. It currently performs well for stateless workloads but many workloads are stateful, which is something Cloud Foundry is working on solving. However, once this piece of the puzzle is solved Korifi will be ready for large deployments.

Even though many people are looking at migrating to Kubernetes, there are still a lot of people who want the Cloud Foundry experience and do not want to let go of it. A small number of people are trying Kubernetes through Cloud Foundry. Nonetheless, many organizations continue to use Cloud Foundry and want to keep the ecosystem alive.

Complexity remains a challenge for Kubernetes and one of the ways Cloud Foundry has been helping to ease some of this complexity is to provide a more open and composable framework. The Cloud Native community can also take the lessons learned from the Cloud Foundry community over the past ten years and learn from the mistakes and the things that they succeeded with.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.