KubeCon: Cloud Foundry Intros New K8s API Abstraction, Buildpacks
The Cloud Foundry (CF) community is hard at work on its goal of fully integrating open source Cloud Foundry with Kubernetes. We are very excited to be returning to KubeCon after several years to showcase two new projects for the CNCF community: Korifi, a new Cloud Foundry abstraction layer for the Kubernetes API and Paketo Buildpacks, a collection of cloud-native buildpacks.
But, before we dig into what makes these two technologies so important, let’s examine some history.
 Cloud Foundry, as a technology, shares a lot of foundational similarities with Kubernetes. They are both built to run applications reliably and efficiently at planet scale. They both share the DNA of Borg and have been relentlessly focused on a better development and operations experience for practitioners. They achieve this through the use of containerization, effective isolation and self-healing. Additionally, the two technologies are fully open source and governed by their communities.Â
Where they differ is in their approach toward actualizing the promise of a better developer experience. Cloud Foundry sets out to achieve its promise via a developer-first approach, where the focus has been on the source-to-URL contract. This means a developer works directly with the CF interface and the rest of the underlying technologies and processes are abstracted away completely. Kubernetes’ locus is set firmly around container scheduling and orchestration. The secret sauce for developers is in the form of flat files written with declarative syntax describing the desired state of infrastructure toward which the Kubernetes engine drives. Â
Despite taking divergent approaches, Cloud Foundry as a community and Kubernetes’ vast ecosystem of related projects set out to accomplish the same end goal. That is, the ability for developers to build containerized applications and deploy them to infrastructure―and to do that with observability, security and other important considerations included in this build-and-deploy workflow. Our community has invested several hundred person-hours to rearchitecting Cloud Foundry to be built on Kubernetes primitives which has led to significant progress toward successfully meeting this requirement.Â
Korifi Abstraction
Korifi is one giant leap for cloud-native kind.
A PaaS abstraction, which offers a platform-based approach, has always been considered an excellent way to ease into a new technology ecosystem. Applying the Korifi abstraction to Kubernetes clusters can mean the same for software engineering teams that are working with Kubernetes. With little- to-no knowledge of Kubernetes required, the tool comes with defaults for any team that needs to hit the ground running with Kubernetes. Korifi provides the familiar cf push interface, while making use of various CNCF projects underneath. It works on public, private, and hybrid clouds and can also be deployed to edge devices, thanks to its small footprint. Just as easily. Underneath the hood, Korifi makes use of several CNCF projects to provide load balancing, ingress, services, and metrics. It uses cloud native buildpacks to create containers. Â
Cloud-Native Buildpacks
Buildpacks, which were pioneered by Heroku around the year 2011, are now making a comeback in a cloud-native avatar. This CNCF incubating project offers the best means to containerize applications written in any language. The project aims to unify various buildpack ecosystems with its specification while also embracing standards meant to govern containers. Paketo Buildpacks are an implementation of the base cloud-native buildpacks (CNB) spec. The Paketo open source project provides production-ready buildpacks for the most popular languages and frameworks. So many tooling products (e.g. Waypoint, DigitalOcean App Platform, Korifi) are adopting Buildpacks for use in their build phase before deploying containers to a runtime.
Check out these two products at KubeCon.Â
We believe that KubeCon offers the perfect platform to showcase these two technologies for developers and platform operators. We hope interested folks will come forward and participate actively as contributors and maintainers. But that’s not all!Â
We are also devoting a significant part of Cloud Foundry Day, held on Tuesday, October 25, to these two technologies. After three years, we’re returning to in-person events and are of the opinion that being co-located with KubeCon is the best way to reach the right folks that will benefit from these technologies.
Chris Clark, program manager, The Linux Foundation, co-authored this piece.
To hear more about cloud-native topics, join the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and the cloud-native community at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon North America 2022 – October 24-28, 2022