In order to more tightly align its platforms with Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry has added two new projects—Eirini and CF Containerization—to its lineup.
Eirini and CF Containerization were accepted by two of the Cloud Foundry Project Management Committees (PMCs) that oversee platform engineering of the open source projects. Eirini is an incubating project within the Application Runtime PMC while CF Containerization will incubate within the BOSH PMC.
The news was announced Wednesday at the at the Cloud Foundry EU Summit in Basel, Switzerland. Announced at last year’s European Summit, Cloud Foundry Container Runtime (CFCR) is housed in the Extensions PMC and uses Kubernetes.
“Eirini and CF Containerization are the latest examples of the Cloud Foundry community’s approach to continuously exploring future evolutionary directions for the platform,” said Chip Childers, CTO, Cloud Foundry Foundation, in a prepared statement. “Developers have made it clear they need a simple, agile and flexible delivery method to push apps to production, which Cloud Foundry Application Runtime delivers. They also have multiple use cases in which deployment and management of software packaged into containers is critical. These new projects demonstrate additional approaches to combining Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry technologies.”
Eirini was first proposed by IBM and it has additional contributions from SUSE and SAP. Eirini allows operators and product vendors to use Kubernetes as the underlying container scheduler for the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime.
Container schedulers are becoming increasingly commoditized, with many businesses standardizing on Kubernetes. The Eirini project’s goal is to provide developers with the “cf push” experience that makes it easer to push an app to production on top of Kubernetes.
CF Containerization was initially developed by SUSE, which then donated it to Cloud Foundry. It was designed to package Cloud Foundry BOSH, which were first developed by VMware, releases into containers and to deploy those containers into Kubernetes.
The intent of this project is to help operators with deploying the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime into existing Kubernetes clusters.
RELATED: Special Report—How service providers are using containers and Kubernetes
CFCR was developed and donated by Google and Pivotal, the latter of which was spun off from VMware. It's the Cloud Foundry community’s approach to deploying and managing Kubernetes clusters using the BOSH release engineering tool chain. The project was designed to make deploying and managing containers in an enterprise environment easier and more flexible.
The Foundation also announced that Huawei Cloud has become one of Cloud Foundry’s infrastructure providers and that HCL has joined as a gold member.
Cloud Foundry is an open source technology that is backed by Cisco, Dell EMC, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Microsoft, Pivotal, SAP and SUSE. Its technologies are being used by companies in the manufacturing, telecommunications and financial services sectors.