Cloud Foundry Foundation Adds Marketplace to Korifi PaaS for Kubernetes
The Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF) has created an online marketplace for applications built using Korifi, an open-source platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment that is designed to be deployed on Kubernetes clusters.
Initially launched in 2022, Korifi integrates and provides application development teams with a DevOps toolchain for building, testing, deploying and monitoring cloud-native applications. It’s based on the same core PaaS technologies that the CFF spearheaded, to accelerate the development of 12-factor applications that run on virtual machine platforms.
Ram Iyengar, chief evangelist for the CFF, said Korifi similarly makes it simpler to follow best practices for building and deploying applications at a higher level of abstraction versus requiring application developers to manage Kubernetes infrastructure at a much lower level.
The release of Korifi 0.13.0 adds an online marketplace through which pre-built applications and services can be discovered in the same way the CFF makes available a marketplace for 12-factor applications and services, says Iyengar.
It’s not clear how much traction Korifi is gaining, but interest in more opinionated PaaS environments to build cloud-native applications is on the rise. Organizations of all sizes are under increased pressure to build and deploy these applications faster.
A Techstrong survey finds roughly 60% of respondents work for organizations making significant investments in container and orchestration technologies over the next two years. A total of 20% plan to make significant investments in these areas compared to 40% and 38% making modest investments in containers and orchestration technologies, respectively.
Overall, well over half of respondents work for organizations that have already deployed cloud-native applications in a production environment, with another 22% now evaluating whether to follow suit, the survey finds.
The key to achieving that goal is to, of course, improve the developer experience, noted Iyengar. Today there are simply too many technologies that developers are expected to master, each of which increases the total amount of cognitive load that each developer is expected to carry, he added.
Many of the organizations already building and deploying cloud-native applications have cobbled together their own PaaS environments. The issue many of them are now considering is to what degree makes sense for those organizations to continue to maintain those platforms, versus standardizing on a PaaS environment that is curated on behalf of multiple organizations. With the rise of platform engineering as a methodology for managing DevOps workflows at scale, the number of organizations that are now having that conversation has increased significantly.
Ultimately, the CFF needs to build a sustainable community around Korifi if the project is to gain and maintain relevance. The challenge is that multiple alternative PaaS platforms for Kubernetes environments are all vying for adoption.
On the plus side, it’s steadily becoming simpler to build a modern cloud-native application by giving developers access to a curated PaaS environment that enables them to self-service their own requirements, within a set of well-defined guardrails that have been defined by a centralized IT team.
