CFF Certifies Kubernetes as Diego Alternative

The Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF) announced today that it has begun certifying distributions of its namesake platform for building and deploying applications that make use of Kubernetes as an alternative to the Diego container orchestration engine originally employed by the CFF.

Atos, Cloud.gov, IBM, SAP, SUSE, Swisscom and VMware have all renewed their Cloud Foundry Platform Certification for 2020, which gives them the option to formally replace Diego with Kubernetes.

Chip Childers, newly appointed executive director for CFF, says via a Project Eirini the CFF has been working to make it possible to use Kubernetes in place of Diego on the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment.

Organizations that deploy Cloud Foundry are not required to replace Diego, but Childers says many have already signaled degrees that they are moving in that direction.

The shift is part of a longer-term transition that will eventually see much of the substrate on which the Cloud Foundry PaaS is deployed today replaced by Kubernetes, adds Childers. While he concedes there has been some debate over the degree to which Kubernetes should be embraced, he says the CNCF community is now completely aligned on its collective approach to Kubernetes.

At the same time, Paul Fazzone, senior vice president for research and development for the Tanzu service based on Kubernetes provided by VMware, has been named chairman of the board of directors of the CFF. He replaces Dell EMC global CTO John Roese, who led much of the initial effort to create the Cloud Foundry PaaS. VMware last year acquired Pivotal Software, one of the leading providers of a distribution of the Cloud Foundry PaaS. Pivotal Software, VMware and Dell EMC are all units of Dell Technologies.

Childers says that once that transition to Kubernetes infrastructure is completed it should become easier for organizations to deploy the Cloud Foundry PaaS in on-premises IT environments because the resources required to run it will be substantially less. In addition, as cloud service providers increasingly standardize on Kubernetes, many of them will find Cloud Foundry has become more efficient to run at scale.

While the adoption of Kubernetes has substantially increased in the last year, the battle to provide application development platforms for Kubernetes is still nascent. Red Hat married its OpenShift PaaS to Kubernetes several years ago. However, there has not been enough adoption of Kubernetes yet for any application development platform to achieve clear-cut dominance. One of the strengths of Cloud Foundry PaaS environments over the years has been richness of the application development environment, which the CFF now envisions becoming even more accessible on Kubernetes platforms that should require fewer resources to run an instance of Cloud Foundry.

Clearly, the CFF is now in a race against time to complete its transition to Kubernetes. As Kubernetes continues to gain momentum many organizations will in the months ahead make decisions based on what’s available today. However, among those that have already adopted Cloud Foundry PaaS environments, there are now also a lot fewer reasons to migrate away from a platform that continues to evolve.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

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