Cloud Foundry Advisory Board Meeting, July 2019: Stratos for K8s
The Cloud Foundry Community Advisory Board (CAB) meeting for July 2019 focused on the evolution of community projects, including the ongoing integration with Kubernetes. Moderated by Michael Maximilien (a.k.a. Dr. Max) of IBM, the call featured regular updates from various members of the development teams and from the CF Foundation.
Extending Stratos to Kubernetes
Neil MacDougall
Stratos is an open-source web UI for managing Cloud Foundry. It was initially proposed to CF Extensions back in 2017. Since then, there have been a lot of updates. Neil MacDougall of SUSE provided the following summary of changes:
- UI improvements, including the navigation structure
- user favorites for faster navigation
- inviting users via e-mail
- quota management
- metrics
- Autoscaler UI integration
- improvements for extending Stratos
Neil demonstrated the various improvements mentioned above, as well as particularly major development—support for Kubernetes. By extending Stratos to Kubernetes, users get the following features:
- an ability to connect Stratos to a Kubernetes cluster
- authentication for Microsoft Azure, AWS, GKE, and SUSE CaaSP
- views to help users to manage SUSE Cloud Application Platform in their Kubernetes environments
- view namespaces and pods
- a link to a Kubernetes dashboard
A Kubernetes view in the Stratos dashboard“Our initial focus was on views that would help you to understand how Cloud Foundry was running on top of the Kubernetes platform. We’re also adding the ability to link to and embed the Kubernetes dashboard.” —Neil MacDougall, SUSE
Not only for K8s: ExternalDNS for Cloud Foundry
David Grizzanti
One of the problems developers face when using Cloud Foundry is that applications are bound to a single CF availability zone. According to David Grizzanti of Comcast, this also means a lack of portability, while domain name servers (DNS) are tied to the name of applications.
During the call, David proposed the idea of extending an existing project in Kubernetes, called ExternalDNS, to work with Cloud Foundry, as well. ExternalDNS is a Kubernetes-incubated project with the idea to configure external DNS servers for Kubernetes ingresses and services.
Some of the benefits of expanding the project to support Cloud Foundry includes:
- Having all the integration with existing DNS providers to extend to Cloud Foundry.
- Abstracting DNS, so fully qualified domain name servers are not tied to a single availability zone.
“Our proposal was, could we extend that project to also support Cloud Foundry? That way, you’d get the benefit of having all the integration with the existing DNS providers and extend that to Cloud Foundry.” —David Grizzanti, Comcast
Comcast’s work on External-DNS for Cloud Foundry can be tracked in this GitHub repository.
Runtime PMC
Eric Malm
Eric Malm of Pivotal listed the following developments:
- The Runtime teams have begun tracking community proposals in this GitHub repository.
- cf-deployment v10 was proposed and will be released soon.
- CF CLI v6.46.0 was released, having experimental support for service-instance upgrades.
- The CAPI team is progressing on rolling deployment states.
- The UAA team has dramatically improved the
/Usersendpoint performance. - The Diego team has improved internal security for its file-server component by closing up some of the last non-TLS communication inside Cloud Foundry.
- The Eirini team is working on scale and performance hardening improvements.
- The Networking team is continuing to improve the scale of Istio integrations.
- The Garden-Windows team is incorporating NGINX to support gorouter-to-app TLS.
BOSH
Mukesh Gadiya
Mukesh Gadiya of Pivotal posted some new changes:
- BOSH v270.3.0 was released.
- The Director team is continuing to work on new endpoints to improve the behavior of the BOSH start, stop, recreate, and restart commands.
- The Systems team is working on two stemcell-related charters, including a bionic stemcell, as well as bringing transparency and predictability to how and when stemcells are delivered for new Ubuntu OS releases.
- Both teams are working on enabling agents to use short-lived signed URLs for blobstore communication.
CF Extensions
Dr. Max
Michael Maximilien (a.k.a. Dr. Max) of IBM, who moderated the call, provided the following updates:
- App-AutoScaler
- The solution has been integrated into Stratos.
- Scaling changes were introduced.
- Stratos
- Quota management was added, which provides the ability to view and control quotas.
- Extensions are being reworked, so there is a possibility to manage them in separate repositories.
- There were also bug fixes and minor UI improvements.
CF Foundation updates
Swarna Podila
Swarna Podila of the Cloud Foundry Foundation gave a reminder about the upcoming CF Summit Europe, which starts on September 11 in Hague. The schedule for the event is already live, so attendees can start adding sessions to their agendas. Day 0 of the summit, which is scheduled for September 10, includes a Contributor Summit, a hackathon, a certified developer exam, a Cloud Foundry User Day, and an unconference. Swarna also noted that the standard registration will end on August 2, and registration fees will go up by August 3.
The next CAB call is scheduled for Wednesday, August 21. The call will start at 8 a.m. Pacific Time. Anyone interested can join Cloud Foundry’s CAB Slack channel.
Want details? Watch the video!
