Kubernetes

Basel was once again the location for the European edition of the Cloud Foundry Summit a few weeks ago. A big topic this year was the rise of Kubernetes, and how it impacts Cloud Foundry. The traditional view would be that Kubernetes is yet another IaaS, and in this community we have BOSH to deal with that. However, it’s not that simple for a number of reasons:

• Cloud Foundry still has its own - purpose built - container orchestrator. One question is how and when it will be replaced by the more general purpose Kubernetes. Project Eirini addresses this.
• With Kubernetes we have a new generic open-source infrastructure API across clouds and vendors - is it time to replace BOSH, or will we still need it? Project Quarks (CF Containerization) addresses this.

The video below shows a recap and includes an interview with Chip Childers, CTO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation addressing these points:

Cloud Foundry on Enterprise ARM

Earlier this year in Boston, we showed our ‘Cloud Foundry on Raspberry PI’ experiment in which we demonstrated we could run CF apps on ARM chips.

This time we took it up a notch and deployed the Cavium Marvell ThunderX, a 96 core enterprise ARM beast which we rented from Packet.

96 ARM cores

We also went one step further on the deployment side: not only did we deploy containerized applications to run on ARM cores, this time we made all the Cloud Foundry components themselves run on this ARM chip using Terraform and OpenStack.

The technical details and why can be found here and in the recording: