Cloud Foundry Advisory Board Meeting, Apr 2020: Paketo Buildpacks
Troy Topnik
This month’s Cloud Foundry Community Advisory Board (CAB) meeting featured two new community projects: Paketo Buildpacks and Cloud Foundry Tutorials.
The meeting also discussed recent changes to the leadership of the CF Foundation, as well as updates around the ecosystem projects. The call was moderated by Troy Topnik of SUSE.
Paketo Buildpacks
Dedicated to maintaining a vendor-neutral governance process, Paketo Buildpacks is a new project from the Cloud Foundry Buildpacks team. The goal is to form a collection of open-source cloud-native buildpacks for the most prominent languages and frameworks to serve as a viable Dockerfile alternative. Paketo Buildpacks will generate container images—compatible with Open Container Initiative (OCI)—that run on Kubernetes.
Kashyap Vedurmudi
According to Kashyap Vedurmudi of VMware, Paketo Buildpacks are tentatively scheduled to launch on April 21, 2020. Upon launch, the project will support Java, .NET Core, Node.js, Go, NGINX, and PHP.
“The Paketo Buildpacks project is part of the CNCF itself, whose goal is to build out the overall cloud-native buildpacks specification. The project is focused more on implementing buildpacks that conform to that specification.” —Kashyap Vedurmudi, VMware
All buildpacks packaged in CF4K8s will be Paketo Buildpacks. All the Cloud Foundry buildpacks will continue to be supported. However, over time, the currently supported major version line of each buildpack will be deprecated in favor of a new Cloud Foundry–compatible Paketo Buildpack.
The project will use the Apache 2.0 license. While a roadmap is not available yet, support for Ruby and Python is currently planned. Additional information about Paketo Buildpacks is available in its FAQ. Anyone interested in following the project’s development can join the Paketo Buildpacks Slack channel.
Cloud Foundry Tutorials
Maintained by the Foundation, Cloud Foundry Tutorials is a set of easy-to-use guides around the platform and other related cloud-native technologies. Currently, you can follow the tutorials’ guidelines either through your own instance of Cloud Foundry or on Katacoda.
Steve Greenberg
Steeve Greenberg of Resilient Scale provided an overview of the project and a live demonstration. He also suggested that other Cloud Foundry projects could showcase new features through similar tutorials.
“Our goal here is to collect and curate sets of tutorials that are easily consumable for various relevant audiences. As a community, we can do better at introducing people to core concepts and doing some of those things quickly.” —Steeve Greenberg, Resilient Scale
Passing Cloud Foundry Tutorials on Katakoda (Image credit)Cloud Foundry Tutorials’ GitHub repo
Runtime PMC
Eric Malm
Eric Malm of Pivotal noted the following developments:
- The Release Integration team pushed CF4K8s v0.1.0. They are also refining the change criteria for cf-deployment v13.
- The KubeCF team is integrating Eirini Helm chart and UAA Kubernetes deployment, instead of BOSH releases.
- The CAPI team completed the initial kpack integration. They are also exporting StatsD metrics to Prometheus.
- The Networking team is working on CRDs for Cloud Foundry routes. They are also exploring
app-security-groupssupport on Kubernetes. - The Eirini team is improving support for some Cloud Controller v3 API commands.
- The UAA team is continuing to refine its Kubernetes secret management.
- The Loggregator team integrated container metrics in CF4K8s. They are now working on control plane app logs.
BOSH
Troy mentioned that the BOSH team had released v4.3.1 of Quarks. The new version includes improvements to accomodate KubeCF changes (e.g., consuming Eirini charts).
Stratos
Richard Cox
Richard Cox of SUSE noted the release of Stratos v3.0, which includes the following developments:
- Applications can be deployed via a Docker image.
- Users can view Cloud Foundry events at the organization and space levels.
- Error reporting and notifications have been improved.
- The dark mode has been added.
CF Foundation updates
Swarna Podila
Swarna Podila provided details to recent changes to the Cloud Foundry Foundation’s leadership. Most notably, Chip Childers is now the Executive Director, and Paul Fazonne of VMware is now the Chairman. We would like to thank Abby Kearns, who made an enormous contribution to the welfare of the Foundation and the community, and wish her all the good luck in her future encounters.
According to Chip, the Foundation will be focusing on two key goals moving forward: growing the community further and bringing good developer experience to Kubernetes.
“We as a community have a long experience in providing great developer-centric experience to enterprise developers everywhere. Now that Kubernetes is showing up everywhere, we need to bring that developer experience. Regardless of Kubernetes distribution or cloud provider offering you’re using, there’s a pretty significant gap between enterprise developer and Kubernetes.” —Chip Childers, CF Foundation
Chip Childers
With the COVID-19 pandemic, Chip explained that the North American Summit is almost certainly going to be held virtually. Details about the European Summit will have to wait as international travel bans are making it difficult to plan ahead. Meanwhile, you may be interested in the bi-weekly technical round-up.
The next CAB call is preliminary scheduled for May 20, 2020, at 8 a.m. PDT. Anyone interested can join Cloud Foundry’s CAB Slack channel.
Want details? Watch the video!
You can check out the video recording of the CAB call.
Below, you can also find the video recording of the Kubernetes SIC community call held on March, 31.
