Cloud Foundry Advisory Board Meeting, July 2018: Intro to SHIELD

by Roger StrukhoffJuly 19, 2018

There were also community updates from Service Fabrik, Project BlockHead, and other initiatives.

Dr. Max

This month’s Cloud Foundry Community Advisory Board (CAB) call revisited a couple of ongoing projects and acknowledged a transition within one of the key product management groups. The call was held on Wednesday, July 18, and was led by IBM’s Michael Maximilien (aka Dr. Max).

Before commencing the Service Fabrik, SHIELD v8, and Project BlockHead updates, call participants discussed a few other news.

Table of Contents

Nominations open for new BOSH leader

Dmitriy Kalinin

The acknowledged transition was that of Pivotal’s Dmitriy Kalinin, who has served as Cloud Foundry BOSH PM for several years. Attendees paid respect to Dmitriy’s tireless leadership in developing and improving BOSH. Among the accolades, Dr. Max noted, “Dmitriy has been a really phenomenal, fearless leader and proponent of BOSH and open source.”

Dmitriy introduced Morgan Fine, the newest member of the BOSH team.

Morgan Fine

Dmitriy remains at Pivotal, where he will focus on other activities. He suggested a replacement, although nominations are still open. Community members who wish to nominate someone can do so through the cf-dev mailing lists.

As for the BOSH project itself, Xenial stemcell is now ready for testing.

BOSH’s GitHub repo

Runtime PMC

Eric Malm

Eric Malm from Pivotal provided a Runtime PMC update, noting that the routing team had posted a proposal about weighted routing to cf-dev.

Eric also noted that the CAPI team is making progress on rolling application updates.

Runtime PMC’s GitHub repo

Garden

Dr. Julz

Eric and IBM’s Julian Friedman (aka Dr. Julz) reported that the Garden team has incepted ideas about providing better CPU monitoring and context inside of Cloud Foundry, along with better controls.

Garden’s GitHub repo

Service Fabrik

Ashish Jain

SAP’s Ashish Jain led a team update about the Service Fabrik broker, during which they demonstrated some new fault-tolerance capabilities. Service Fabrik is a Cloud Foundry service broker that provisions BOSH- and Docker-based service deployments.

Service Fabrik was developed by SAP, open-sourced in August 2017, and first demonstrated at a CAB call in September 2017.

Architecture overview of Service Fabrik (Image credit)

Service Fabrik’s GitHub repo

SHIELD

James Hunt

Chief Architect James Hunt from Stark & Wayne outlined the company’s SHIELD project. This had its genesis with the ops side “getting nervous” about (the lack of) backup services within Cloud Foundry, James said.

With v8, “there’s been a complete re-tooling,” he said. He noted that “open-source software doesn’t often get a lot of marketing,” so the company devoted a session to it at the Boston summit, has created a website devoted to it, and is now creating a Slack channel, a Trello board, and roadmap calls each month.

SHIELD protects critical infrastructural data (Image credit)

SHIELD’s GitHub repo

Project BlockHead

Dr. Max said feedback on Project BlockHead will close very soon, and then a vote will be held to see if it should be accepted as part of Cloud Foundry.

Using Ethereum, Project BlockHead aims to eliminate the currently cumbersome process of integrating smart contracts into applications that can run them. The project’s proponents have said that it “takes advantage of the Open Service Broker API specification to have a service broker layer placed between the web application and the blockchain network. Doing so, the broker can take control of managing a smart contract by automating creation and deployment of smart contracts and then exposing the required set of information to the web application.”

BlockHead simplifies the smart contract cycle (Image credit)

Project BlockHead’s GitHub repo

Summit updates

Chip Childers

Chip Childers provided a quick update about the CF Summit Europe, to be held in Basel, Switzerland, October 10–11. He said there are now 190+ registrations, and he provided a link to the summit schedule.

He mentioned that there are only a few days left to take a member survey that seeks opinions about Foundation benefits. He also noted the Foundation being represented at the OSCON event in Portland this week.

An update about The Open Service Broker API project will be presented at Basel. Announced in December 2016 and under Foundation management, this initiative aims to let developers to deliver services to applications running on cloud-native platforms, including Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes.

Open Service Broker API deprecates platform specific terminology (Image credit)

Chris Clark

Chris Clark from the Foundation said there will also be a hackathon in Basel. He noted there was a very successful hackathon at this year’s North American Summit in Boston, with the Ethereum-driven Project BlockHead developed there advancing into the CF-Extensions ecosystem.

The next CAB call is scheduled for Wednesday, August 15, at 8 a.m. PDT. The calls end promptly within one hour, and are open to anyone who wishes to participate. Connection details and the monthly agenda appear on the Cloud Foundry Slack channel.