Cloud Foundry Advisory Board Meeting, Feb 2021: Improving CF Marketplace
Chris Clark
This month’s Cloud Foundry Community Advisory Board (CAB) meeting featured a discussion around CF Marketplace, its open-source alternatives, and a number of community projects in progress. The teams also reported development updates around the ecosystem projects. The call was moderated by Chris Clark from the Cloud Foundry Foundation.
CF Marketplace and its alternatives
CF Marketplace consumes managed services from application workloads. These managed services include:
- Discovering offers
- Service defintion
- Service plan and metadata
- Service plan visibility within organizations
- Provisioning
- Parameters
- Dashboard single sign-on and authorization
- Quotas
- Update plan and maintenance upgrade
- Share service instance
- Binding
- Credentials
- Route service
- Syslog drain
- Unbinding
- Unprovisioning
Guillaume Berche
According to Guillaume Berche from Orange, CF Marketplace is a primary differentiator to the ecosystem and is still best user experience relating to open-source alternatives for key use cases. These include Kubernetes custom resources with operator packaging or Helm chart packaging, Terraform modules wrapped as custom resources, and Open Service Broker (OSB) API client for the Kubernetes Service Catalog.
Guillaume noted that Orange focused on the OSB API client in particular and started the osb-to-helm-poc project to improve it with a working interface.
“We tried to find a web UI to consume Service Catalog in the Kubernetes ecosystem. There used to be kubeapps, but it was removed, so we are missing an interface. We experimented with automatically generating a Helm chart facade for the OSB to consume.” —Guillaume Berche, Orange
A prototype interface for service discovery (Image credit)Next, Guillaume expanded the discussion to include additional projects that may be valuable to the community. First is the osb-cmdb, another project by Orange aimed at creating a marketplace that is shared among multiple platforms (CF Foundations, Kubernetes clusters, and IaaS tenants).
“The idea is to use Cloud Foundry as a database that manages service instance, service binding, and service offering.” —Guillaume Berche, Orange
osb-cmdb as a controller between platforms and service providers (Image credit)The second project, which is still in the conceptualization phase, is about using Cloud Foundry as an identity and access management component. The idea is to enable unified onboarding on multiple cloud hosting offerings.
A unified onboarding workflow (Image credit)All of the Orange projects are still works in progress, and Guillaume is looking for feedback from the community. To conclude, he noted that the CF and OSB API ecosystems have great potential to serve valuable enterprise use cases. The collaboration between the CF user community, core OSS contributors, and downstream vendors have made the CF community a success in the past. Such a collaboration still has plenty of opportunities in the enterprise market.
osb-to-helm-poc’s GitHub repo | osb-cmdb’s GitHub repo
Runtime PMC
Eric Malm
Eric Malm from VMware reported the following developments:
- The Release Integration team delivered cf-deployment v16.2.0 and cf-for-k8s v2.0.0.
- The KubeCF team released KubeCF v2.7.12, which includes bumped dependencies.
- The CAPI and Services API teams are nearly done working on Cloud Controller API v3 endpoints for services.
- The Eirini team released Eirini v3.0.0 with ConfigMap instead of templates. The team also spiked around taking existing Cloud Foundry Buildpacks and shimming them as Cloud Native Buildpacks, so kpack has fewer incompatibilities with Paketo Buildpacks.
BOSH
The team pushed BOSH v271.5.0, which includes a fix for an issue with BOSH Director jobs.
Foundation updates
Chris had a few announcements. First, there is going to be a hands-on lab about configuring data protection using cf-protect and SHIELD Cloud. The lab will take place on February 23 at 10 a.m. PT. Second, the foundation is planning to host a virtual event either in June or July. More details will be announced next month. Finally, the revamp of the Cloud Foundry Foundation technical governance is progressing well. The CF Technical Governance meetings are scheduled for February 19 and March 5.
In his latest biweekly technical round-up, Chris noted the release of CF Acceptance Tests v7.1.0, Loggregator v106.4.0, and CAPI v1.106.0. He also mentioned a live stream that will cover setting up simple CI/CD pipelines deployed to Kubernetes with CF-for-K8s. You can also attend CF-for-K8s SIG meeting on March 2.
The community events scheduled for March 2021 (Online calendar)The next CAB call is tentatively scheduled for March 17, 2021, at 8 a.m. PDT. Anyone interested can join Cloud Foundry’s CAB or cf-operators Slack channels.
Want details? Watch the video!
