Containers are eating the software world - Kubernetes is the king of containers. So if you're working on any large software project, especially in an enterprise, you're going to run into this situation sooner or later. Cloud Foundry, which held its semi-annual developer conference in Boston this week, is an interesting example.
Outside the world of enterprise developers, cloud computing remains an unknown entity, even though at least half of the Fortune 500 companies have users (though in the startup world, it has little traction). If you're not familiar with Cloud Foundry, you can think of it as similar to Heroku, but as an open source project with a large commercial ecosystem, and the ability to run it on any cloud or on-premises installation. Developers write their code (following the 12-factor approach), define what it needs to run, and Cloud Foundry handles all the underlying infrastructure, and scales if necessary. Ideally, this would free developers from having to think about where their applications are running and allow them to work more efficiently.
To make this possible, Cloud Foundry bet on Docker early on, even before Docker took shape. Since Kubernetes has yet to land, many of the various companies involved in cloud computing have come together to build their own container orchestration systems, a project that still underpins most of the services today.
However, as Kubernetes has matured, calls for Kubernetes support have grown louder within the Cloud Foundry ecosystem. Last year, the foundation announced its first major move in this direction, launching a Kubernetes-based container runtime for managing containers alongside existing application runtimes. This way, developers can use Cloud Foundry to run and manage their new (and existing) monolithic applications, running in parallel with the new services they develop.
But, remember how cloud computing uses its own container service while the application is running? There really is no reason to do so now, as Kubernetes (and other projects in its ecosystem) has become the default for handling containers. So it's perhaps no surprise that there is now a Cloud Foundry project aimed at replacing the old container management system and Kubernetes. After all, container management isn't what differentiates Cloud Foundry. Rather, it's to the developer's advantage - the whole point of cloud computing at some point in the future is that developers don't have to care about the internal basic units of infrastructure.
On the other hand, the Cloud Foundry ecosystem is also embracing Kubernetes. Because Cloud Foundry is also software, there's nothing stopping you from running it on top of Kubernetes. So some big cloud computing vendors, including SUSE and IBM, are doing just that. SUSE Cloud Application Platform is a certified cloud computing platform that can run on any public cloud Kubernetes infrastructure, including Microsoft Azure Container Service. As the SUSE team told me, that means not only is it easier to deploy, but it also requires less resource-intensive operation. Likewise, IBM is now offering cloud computing to its customers on Kubernetes, although it's just calling it an experimental product for now. Don Boulia, IBM's general manager of cloud development services, emphasized that IBM's clients are primarily looking for ways to run their workloads in an isolated environment that isn't shared with other IBM clients.
Boulia also emphasized that for most customers, it's not about Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry. For most of his clients, using Kubernetes is itself migrating their existing applications to the cloud. And for new applications, these customers choose to run cloud computing. This is also emphasized by the SUSE team. One pattern SUSE sees is that potential customers will think of setting up a container environment and then, during the conversation, decide how to implement cloud computing.
In fact, the message of this week's event is that Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry are complementary technologies. This was highlighted by Chen Goldberg, director of engineering for Google's Container Engine and Kubernetes, during a panel discussion at the event.
CNCF is the Kubernetes organization, all under the management of the Linux Foundation. They took a different approach. With Cloud Foundry more emphasis on enterprise users than CNCF. There may be some politics here, but for the most part, the two groups seem friendly enough — and they do already have many members. "We're part of the CNCF and part of the Cloud Foundry Foundation," CEO Rob Mee told our Ron Miller. "Increasingly, these communities are sharing technology, developing together. Not completely independent, nor suppressing competition. Very complex and nuanced. CNCF and Cloud Foundry are part of a larger ecosystem that provides free and converged technology .
We may see more technology sharing - perhaps collaboration - between CNCF and Cloud Foundry. After all, CNCF is an organization of many very interesting projects that build cloud computing applications, which also have quite a few use cases in cloud computing.