Cloud Foundry Summit 2019 – Continuously Building the Future

Cloud Foundry Summit 2019 in Philadelphia was the first event on our list of conferences we’re heading to this year. It was an excellent season opening and another example that Cloud Foundry community is developing well. “Building the future” – this year’s motto is a good metaphor for the current situation. Cloud Foundry is evolving, and it’s perfectly fine.

A quote from Abby Kearns, Executive Director of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, can summarize what’s happening these days:

“We’re all kayakers now, navigating the rapids of change. The quickest learners will be the biggest winners.”

Abby Kearns started the summit with this powerful statement, and she addressed the fact that influence the way we develop our companies – technology is evolving at a rapid pace. The cloud-native landscape is continuously growing as new solutions and ideas are introduced on a regular basis. Often easy to use, but not developed enough to use them on production without taking some risk. How to choose the right technologies? When to adopt them? Should the whole application or component be rewritten? As Abby said, the quickest learners will be the biggest winners.

During the event, we had a chance to see how many of those tools have evolved into more mature and more customer-friendly apps. From the end-user perspective, it was promising to see them working together, as it gives a glimpse of how it may look in the future.

Cloud Foundry Loves Kubernetes

One of the hottest topics in the corridors was for sure the Eirini project. This is a perfect example of how software should evolve – and yes, Cloud Foundry Foundation isn’t too proud to admit that Kubernetes is better than Diego/Garden in particular cases. This is how one open source should work with another.

A year ago one could ask if Kubernetes will push Cloud Foundry into the shadow. The question was wrong – how could we compare apples and oranges? To simplify things, we can call Cloud Foundry an Application PaaS, while Kubernetes can be described as a Container PaaS. This year we’re discussing how they can work together. As this seems to be the right question the Eirini project may be the right answer.

We can’t wait to hear more about Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes collaboration. Especially given the fact that the project was proclaimed to pass core functional tests and it is ready early adopters.Learn more about Project Eirini

Interoperability

One of the keywords announcing the conference was interoperability. Eirini is a good example of that. TheCloud Foundry project continues to integrate with other open source projects to provide more capabilities for users. Platform maturity allows to incorporate new tools easily and makes the whole process user-friendly.

Worth noting is the fact that all of these tools are somehow used (or will be used soon) in ongoing projects, so it’s not just state of the art. This is for sure a hard work of the community experts that help Cloud Foundry stay ahead of the curve.

The Comcast Story

Philadelphia is home to a large Cloud Foundry member – Comcast. The company story of successful digital transformation is a practical guideline on how it should look like. In this year’s agenda there was no case study about it, but anyway it is worth mentioning and congratulating the Comcast crew. This technology voyage and company restructuring – to be explicit, breaking siloses – should be an inspiration to all of us.

Cloudboostr

It wouldn’t be an honest review without writing some personal summary of how do we feel about our participation in the summit. As an IT consulting company, we were more than excited to be a Silver Sponsor of a conference which gathers hundreds, if not thousands of cloud experts in one place.

Besides an engaging business case study of helping an established company to go through a digital transformation, we’ve also seen a huge interest in our cloud platform – Cloudboostr. A lot of companies want to automate their deployment & delivery tools. Becoming a cloud expert is a long and demanding process for firms that need to be focused on running their business operations. Majority of the world’s top enterprises collaborate with external teams. Some of them use proven solutions that help them adjust to the fast-changing environment. A complete cloud platform (not only PaaS) meets market needs perfectly, and we were happy to tell our new friends about it.

As the “kayakers” we know that it’s a long way to go and we’ll be happy to share our knowledge and experience in order to help our customers move forward.