Cloud Foundry Advisory Board Meeting, June 2020: Gluon Demo

by Carlo GutierrezJune 18, 2020

The Gluon controller aims to enable the management of BOSH and Cloud Foundry deployments right from a Kubernetes control plane cluster.

Chris Clark

This month’s Cloud Foundry Community Advisory Board (CAB) meeting featured a presentation of Gluon, a new project aimed to facilitate the management of BOSH and CF deployments from Kubernetes.

The meeting was moderated by Chris Clark, Technical Operations Manager at the Cloud Foundry Foundation. During the call, he noted that Troy Topnik was nominated and approved as the new PMC lead for CF Extensions. As usual, the development teams also provided updates on the ecosystem projects.

Table of Contents

How can Gluon help?

James Hunt

James Hunt of Stark & Wayne demoed Gluon—a controller that runs BOSH commands translating CustomResourceDefinitions (CRD) of Kubernetes. The project will allow for managing BOSH and Cloud Foundry deployments right from a Kubernetes control plane cluster.

“You’ve got Eirini, which is let’s run Cloud Foundry applications on Kubernetes. You’ve got KubeCF, which is let’s take existing BOSH releases and run those on top of Kubernetes for the purpose of running Cloud Foundry on top of Kubernetes. You’ve also got cf-for-k8s, which is let’s pick up the application bits and put those on Kubernetes. Gluon is the opposite approach. Let’s have Kubernetes run our BOSH stuff to tide us over until such a point when we can make the jump fully over to a Kubernetes-native technology.”
—James Hunt, Stark & Wayne

The components over the dotted line are managed by Gluon (Image credit)

With three CDRs, Gluon helps to:

deploy virtual machines via BOSH
automatically upload BOSHStemcell and ensure that BOSH Directors are up-to-date with the latest security patches
manage cloud-configs and runtime-configs

As James noted, the very idea behind Gluon was inspired by the question, “why can’t Kubernetes deploy virtual machines?”

One of the YAML files for Gluon (Image credit)

Gluon’s GitHub repo

Runtime PMC

Eric Malm

Eric Malm of Pivotal reported the following developments:

The Release Integration team delivered cf-for-k8s v0.3.0 that improves upgradability and configurability.
The KubeCF released v2.2.2 and is currently incorporating UAA Kubernetes deployment resources.
The CLI team is about to release the first general availability of CLI v7.
The CAPI team completed kpack integration to enable Paketo buildpacks in cf-for-k8s.
The UAA team has new leadership, and they are reevaluating their roadmap and a collaboration model.
The Eirini team is continuing to work on application tasks. They are also exploring initial CRD representations of the Eirini API.
The Networking team is nearly done with Route CRD. They are also incorporating Istio v1.6.
The Logging and Metrics teams are working to resolve scaling issues with log cache ingest.

Runtime PMC’s GitHub repo

The summit is in a week!

Chris Clark reminded that Cloud Foundry Summit North America is just a week away and will be held on June 24–25. With the current coronavirus pandemic, the conference will be virtual as previously announced. Welcoming remarks are scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. CDT.

You may also be interested in a bi-weekly technical round-up by Chris.

The next CAB call is tentatively scheduled for July 15, 2020, at 8 a.m. PDT. Anyone interested can join Cloud Foundry’s CAB Slack channel.