Until now, the Cloud Foundry ecosystem, an open-source platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and OpenShift, centered on Red Hat’s Kubernetes, have always been viewed as competing. And both tools have competed with enterprise customers who want to modernize application development and delivery. But recently things have changed. On the technical side, Cloud Foundry began adopting Kubernetes as an option for application deployment and as a way to containerize applications and run Cloud Foundry itself.
The business has changed as IBM has acquired Red Hat. For years, IBM has supported Cloud Foundry as a top-level member of the foundation, and Red Hat has supported its own platform. But now that the acquisition is complete, it’s no wonder IBM is trying to bring Cloud Foundry to the Red Hat platform.
At present, it’s still a technical experiment, but IBM will turn this into a project that the company fully supports, giving Cloud Foundry users the option to deploy applications to OpenShift. On the other hand, it is reasonable to think that OpenShift customers will give their developers a Cloud Foundry experience.
Before this announcement today, Chip Childers, CTO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, told me: “This is also proof that both can work well together. Bringing it a developer experience, IBM has a history of its great commercialization.”
Cloud Foundry isn’t as busy as it was in its early days, but it’s still the most used development platform for large companies. According to a recent user survey conducted by the Cloud Foundry Foundation, companies that already use it want to continue to move more development work to the platform in the future. And according to source {d} ‘s code analysis, the project continues at about 50,000 commits per month.
Abby Kearns, director of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, said: “One thing is very clear when companies are moving towards digitalization and developers are trying to innovate in a cloud-native environment. That means they will face Cloud Foundry as a proven, agile, flexible, and fast platform to build the future, and this is where developers find the anchor that Cloud Foundry offers across the enterprise. The emphasis was also on the ability to build, support, and maximize emerging technologies. “
At this week’s Summit, Pivotal, acquired by VMware, launched Pivotal Application Service (PAS) on Kubernetes, and Swisscom, an early Cloud Foundry supporter, launched a major update to its Cloud Foundry-based Application Cloud.
