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This week I spent a couple of days at the Santa Clara Convention Center for the Cloud Foundry Summit. Here’s a news roundup from the event…

Microsoft signs up to the Cloud Foundry Foundation

News that Microsoft is signing up to be a member of the foundation is particularly interesting given the position Cloud Foundry holds and contrasted with other, related offerings such as Docker, Mesos and Kubernetes. Obviously, the Microsoft of today isn’t anything like that which former CEO Steve Balmer headed – over the past few years, Microsoft has increased its engagement with open source projects and communities, including joining the Linux Foundation in November 2016. The company is currently a leading open source contributor on GitHub and has released .NET Core in open source. And seemingly for good reason – one in three virtual machines powered by Azure run on Linux, over 60 percent of the images in the Azure Marketplace are Linux-based, and the company has continued to bring new open source solutions to Azure through collaborations with Canonical, Docker, Pivotal, SUSE, Red Hat and more.

But the fact that Microsoft is jumping in so deeply with Cloud Foundry will certainly be seen as a real tick of approval, and an affirmation of the position the Foundation holds: that even in a containerized and/or serverless world, a PaaS still has value to give.

Datadog Announces New Integration With Cloud Foundry

Datadog, the cloud monitoring vendor, announced its new integration with Cloud Foundry. Datadog’s Cloud Foundry integration works by collecting metrics that determine cluster health by component and by resource consumption. Metrics can be collected from critical Cloud Foundry components including BOSH, Cloud Controller, Loggregator, Gorouter, and Diego. These metrics can then be visualized so DevOps teams can monitor their performance, identify patterns and anomalies, and create alerts.

“Cloud Foundry has become the leading application deployment platform for many of our enterprise customers that have large-scale, multi-team environments,” said Ilan Rabinovitch, Director of Product Management at Datadog. “Our latest integration enables Cloud Foundry cluster operators to automatically monitor the health of their environments.”

Momentum growing

The new Cloud Foundry Developer Certification will be on tap for summit attendees. Since announcing the program in March of this year, the Foundation proudly informs me that over 5,000 developers have undertaken the training.

In terms of momentum for the Cloud Foundry project, it is being announced that, as of today, there are 2,400 contributors who have jointly made 51,000 commits to the project. 64 companies are members of the foundation and, in an interesting statistic, the foundation is releasing some statistics around the PaaS market and different products’ market share (as an aside, Foundation honcho Abby Kearns has obviously forgotten that she told me that PaaS is dead – at least when it comes to enjoying positive statistics, I guess!) While definitions as to what is actually PaaS are difficult to come by (or, more accurately, everyone has a different one), Cloud Foundry is claiming 35 percent of the total market across all deployments, just ahead of Azure (32 percent), Oracle (28 percent) and AWS (25 percent). Cloud Foundry’s total market value is estimated at $2.8 billion, rising to $5.25 billion in a few years, if estimates from Gartner and Cloud Foundry’s market share both hold true.

Cloud Foundry Community News at Summit:

  • CF Local is a community-developed project that gives users a local Cloud Foundry experience.
  • Open Service Broker API: Version 2.12, the first release of the API as a platform independent specification has been released, allowing services to be used across many platforms.
  • Kubo is a project to enable deployment and ongoing management of the Kubernetes container orchestration tool has joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation as an incubating project, with initial committers from Google and Pivotal.
  • Hazelcast IMDG for Pivotal Cloud Foundry uses on-demand services SDK, a part of Pivotal Cloud Services SDK, to fully utilize BOSH-2.0 features and provision instances more flexibly.
  • anynines’ a9s Kickstart Bundle contains a growing list of production-grade data services for Cloud Foundry, including PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, RabbitMQ and Redis. The Bundle completes the platform with just one single license.
  • Recently announced, SAP Cloud Platform now delivers a multi-cloud business platform based on Cloud Foundry that offers smart business services, Big Data, Internet of Things (IoT) and machine learning capabilities as well as a unified digital market experience via the SAP App Center.
  • Fujitsu has expanded its Cloud Foundry public cloud K5 (a next generation cloud platform, specifically created to enable efficient, easy and cost effective enterprise level digital transformation) into 5 countries (Japan, UK, Finland, Spain, Germany) and will launch it in US this year.

MyPOV

Some interesting announcements and good traction. I had some in-depth conversations at the event and look forward to going into some more detal about them.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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