Cloud Foundry Advisory Board Meeting, Jan 2017: CF Summit’s CFP Is Open

by Roger StrukhoffJanuary 19, 2017

There's a push to get contributions from the wider ecosystem in which Cloud Foundry operates. The Spring framework was cited as a place to start.

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Cloud Foundry Summit 2017

Chip Childers

The Cloud Foundry Foundation plans to be more active in bringing members of other developer communities to this year’s CF Summit, according to the Foundation’s CTO Chip Childers. The summit will be held at the Santa Clara Convention Center June 13–15. Chip’s remarks came during the monthly Cloud Foundry Community Advisory Board (CAB) call.

Chip said the Summit’s Call for Papers (CFP) is now open. The plan is to maintain a traditional blend of:

sessions focused on operations
ecosystem projects
technical paths and forks
and some of the experimental ideas found within the community

“But we want to support developers who work on top of Cloud Foundry a bit more,” he said. A way to do this will be to encourage sponsors to bring in attendees and session ideas. An example would be for Pivotal to its Java-based Spring framework into the program. Other ideas seem limited only to sponsors’ imaginations.

In a sidenote, Chip said no one has yet stepped forward to sponsor or produce an add-on BOSH Day at the Summit, as has been done last year.

Consul, CF v251, and the CLI

Participants then went to cover some technical issues.

Eric Malm

Eric Malm of Pivotal Labs discussed reducing dependence on Consul in cf-release and related releases. “Consul has been a significant source of support issues” and there have been some struggles with commands and operations, he said. “It’s also redundant when between relational databases and BOSH components.” To remedy the situation, he referred to a BOSH-aware DNS server proposal.

Nick Calugar

Nick Calugar of Pivotal mentioned a new feature in Cloud Foundry v251, specifically a new UAA property for rotating signing keys. “This required hard-coded keys before v251,” he noted. “Now, v251 allows for reaching out to grab the keys dynamically. It’s great for security.”

Nick also mentioned that there has been inception on the next phase of isolation segments (originally called elastic clusters) in CAPI, and that routing in isolation segments has started. Progress dates from a proposal that Dieu Cao originated in September.

Dies Koper

A few days prior to the call, Dies Koper of Fujitsu let the community know that the CF CLI team just cut release 6.23.1. “This will be the last release to bundle the deprecated loggregator consumer library,” he wrote. “Deb, yum, and Homebrew repos have been updated; binaries, installers, and release notes are available.

He added that this is “the last release to bundle the deprecated loggregator consumer library, which is used to talk to the loggregator endpoint on CF releases before v212. In the next minor CF CLI release (6.24.0), this library is scheduled to be removed.”

CF-Extensions update

Dr. Max

Dr. Max of IBM mentioned that a new CF-Extensions hub he is leading will have recurring calls in the fourth week of each month, starting next week. He will announce the specific date and time via the cf-dev mailing list soon.

Dr. Max formally announced the hub last month, and held an initial call in December. He said there have already been many projects submitted for consideration.

More community activity

Dan Jahner

An overview of two community projects concluded this month’s call. The first was a hub management proposal called CredHub. Pivotal’s Dan Jahner presented the overview to call participants. He said the project team “has a straightforward intention to create a credential management service that works with Cloud Foundry and BOSH. It supports UAA as a first-class authentication provider, so you can drop this service into an existing deployment, and manage access to authorize all credentials that exist in various deployments. It’s a general-purpose system.”

Bill Chapman

Bill Chapman from Stark&Wayne was up next to discuss a standalone backup-and-restore system called Shield that the company’s been running with BOSH.

“It lets the configuration for backing up a deployment to be done live in the manifest,” he said. “It has a nice set of CL operations to manage backups, retention policies, a web UI that’s polished, and it’s plug-in driven.”

Opportunity to participate

The monthly Cloud Foundry CAB calls offer an opportunity for anyone with an interest in the worldwide community to participate. They have been attracting around 30 participants each month, and its key organizers would love to double that number.

People who are new to the community and want to get up to speed can subscribe to the Slack channel. An initial visit to the Cloud Foundry GitHub can also lead to the diverse activities being conducted by the community’s most active members.

The CAB call schedule has changed this year, moving to the third Wednesday of each month. The next one is scheduled for Wednesday, February 15. The calls begin at 8 a.m. Pacific Time and last approximately one hour.

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