Were circumstances typical, the Cloud Foundry initiative would be conducting its yearly European Summit in Dublin this week. However, given that it is 2020, the event is taking place online. This year has proven to be a period of significant change for the open-source Platform-as-a-Service project—and in multiple respects. Following the departure of Cloud Foundry executive director Abby Kearns earlier in the year, the organization’s former CTO, Chip Childers, assumed the leadership role. Perhaps equally important, the project’s transition to Kubernetes as its preferred container orchestration platform—along with a renewed emphasis on the Cloud Foundry developer experience—is now yielding positive results.

“I began in this role in April, and I communicated: ‘Our community now has a clear, central objective. We will take the Cloud Foundry developer experience and rebuild it on Kubernetes. There will be no further postponement or conflicting viewpoints. It’s time to proceed,’ ” Childers stated (with a laugh). “And here we are. It’s October, our ecosystem is aligned, we have substantial project releases that embody this vision. Furthermore, our community is highly motivated to continue advancing this integration with numerous cloud-native projects.”

Childers asserted that developers currently utilizing Cloud Foundry are highly satisfied, but the project now possesses an opportunity to demonstrate a broader spectrum of potential applications, offering a more streamlined developer experience across virtually any Kubernetes cluster.

One of the initiatives facilitating this transition—and which achieved its 1.0 release today—is cf-for-k8s. Historically, establishing and operating Cloud Foundry was a complex undertaking—often delegated to third-party vendors by most organizations. This new project, launched in April, enables developers to quickly deploy a relatively lightweight Cloud Foundry distribution on a Kubernetes cluster—leveraging projects such as Istio and Fluentd, alongside Kubernetes—within a matter of minutes.

“This development coincides with a comprehensive reimagining of our architecture to more actively incorporate other projects, allowing us to achieve feature parity [with the traditional VM-based Cloud Foundry experience] utilizing a wider range of complementary open-source projects,” Childers explained regarding the broader impact of this project on the overall ecosystem. “This allows our community to dedicate less effort to constructing the foundational infrastructure and [focus] more on accelerating innovation and enhancing the developer experience.”

It is characteristic of open-source initiatives that another project often pursues a similar objective—at least initially. This is exemplified by KubeCF, which also reached its 2.5 release today. This is an open-source distribution of the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime, intended for production environments, and originally designed to assist existing users in adopting Kubernetes. Eventually, these two projects are anticipated to consolidate. “Collaboration is underway to define this unified vision. Currently, they are simply two distinct distributions catering to different use cases,” Childers clarified.

After six months in his new position, Childers observed a considerable amount of enthusiasm within the community. He acknowledged that the role can be challenging when disagreements are unproductive, but currently, he is witnessing “a harmonious consensus.”