Cloud Foundry Advisory Board Meeting, Oct 2020: Introducing cf-protect

This month’s Cloud Foundry Community Advisory Board (CAB) meeting focused on cf-protect, a new community project, as well as development updates around the ecosystem projects. The call was moderated by Troy Topnik from SUSE.

What is cf-protect?

James Hunt of Stark & Wayne demoed cf-protect—a plugin for CF CLI that integrates data service backups with the SHIELD Cloud. The plugin looks through $VCAP_SERVICES to analyze bound data services for any given application. It then automatically sets up your SHIELD Cloud account to facilitate regular scheduled backups of those data services.

James Hunt

“The goal for putting this project together was to make data protection inside of Cloud Foundry as easy as application deployment inside of Cloud Foundry. The biggest strength we see with Cloud Foundry is cf push. With cf push, the ability to go from code to a running application is still pretty groundbreaking in this day and age of Kubernetes and containerization everywhere. We’d like to do the same for data protection.” —James Hunt, Stark & Wayne

A demo of cf-protect

cf-protect is a work in progress. The project currently supports MySQL and PostgreSQL for single-database backups. cf-protect will only recognize service instances tagged as mysql and postgresql. They also need to have the appropriate instance binding credentials.

James noted that support for additional data services will be added in the future and people can request them.

cf-protect’s GitHub repo

Runtime PMC

Eric Malm

Eric Malm from VMware reported the following updates:

• The CLI team released CLI v6.5.3, which is intended to be the final minor release in version 6, barring any security issues or major bugs that need to be addressed. Moving forward, the team will focus on version 7.
• The Release Integration team delivered Cloud Foundry for Kubernetes v1.0.0.
• The KubeCF team updated v2.5 with scaling configuration and v2.6 with Eirini service account configurability.
• The CAPI team finished moving packages into an Open Container Initiative image registry for Cloud Foundry for Kubernetes. The team is now working on scaling improvements.
• The Eirini team is investigating spiking on sidecar support. They are also considering other extensibility mechanisms.
• The Networking team is adding optional support for Contour ingress. The team is also exploring application-to-application service discovery and policy options for Cloud Foundry for Kubernetes.
• The Logging and Metrics team is progressing on log-cache performance and scalability. The team also posted their roadmap for added visibility.

Runtime PMC’s GitHub repo

BOSH

Kevin Rutten

Kevin Rutten of Stark & Wayne noted that the BOSH is making progress on bionic stemcells. The team is still testing and not yet ready to announce general availability.

BOSH’s GitHub repo | BOSH’s Pivotal Tracker

CF Extensions

Troy Topnik

Troy Topnik from SUSE provided updates for CF Extensions. Stratos v4.2 is now available. The new release includes Kubernetes and Helm extensions among other improvements.

He then highlighted the following MultiApps updates:

• Users can now specify multiple instances of a MultiApp in a single Cloud Foundry space.
• Developers can use the service broker parameters to specify which broker to employ for service creation.

CF Extensions’ GitHub repo | Stratos’s GitHub repo | MultiApps’s GitHub repo

What’s next?

Chris Clark

Chris Clark from the Cloud Foundry Foundation thanked the community for supporting the recently concluded virtual European summit. He also wrote a bi-weekly technical round-up, featuring prominent releases and other community updates. You can also check out the video recordings of keynotes and technical sessions from the recent summit.

The next CAB call will resume its regular schedule on November 18, 2020, at 8 a.m. PDT. Anyone interested can join Cloud Foundry’s CAB or cf-operators Slack channels.

Want details? Watch the video!