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​Cloud Foundry embraces Kubernetes

Kubernetes mastery of cloud container management takes another step forward.
Written by Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Senior Contributing Editor

Once upon a time, many technologies, such as Docker Engine and Mesosphere Marathon, were orchestrating cloud containers. They're still out there, but Kubernetes has become the be-all and end-all of cloud container orchestration. Now, in Basel Switzerland at the Cloud Foundry Summit, Cloud Foundry has moved even closer to Kubernetes.

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Cloud Foundry, a prominent open-source Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud, isn't giving up on BOSH its tool chain for release engineering, deployment, and life-cycle management of large scale distributed services. But Cloud Foundry is making it easier to use Kubernetes both independently and as part of BOSH.

The Cloud Foundry Foundation is doing this by accepting two new projects: Eirini and CF Containerization. This comes after last year's adoption of Cloud Foundry Container Runtime (CFCR), which started Cloud Foundry's integration of Kubernetes. CRCR makes it possible to deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters using the BOSH release engineering tool chain.

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Eirini's goal is to enable operators and vendors to use Kubernetes as the underlying container scheduler for the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime. The Eirini project wants to provide developers with the "cf push" experience that makes it easy to push an app to production on top of Kubernetes. IBM started Erini, but the project is already seeing support from SUSE and SAP.

CF Containerization, initially developed by SUSE, is designed to package Cloud Foundry BOSH releases into containers and deploy those containers into Kubernetes.

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The overall goal is to give end-users a more consistent operational experience between application and container platforms. To further help this, additional projects that focus on shared logging and metrics and unified networking -- via technologies like Istio and Open Service Broker API (OSBAPI)-compliant service catalog synchronization -- are also on their way.

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