Cloud Foundry Advisory Board Meeting, Nov 2020: Conformance-Based Certification

by Carlo GutierrezNovember 19, 2020
The new certification is adopted from the existing Cloud Foundry Acceptance Tests with the motivation to enable innovation around the platform distributions.

This month’s Cloud Foundry Community Advisory Board (CAB) meeting discussed a proposal for a new CF certification program. As usual, the teams also delivered development updates around the ecosystem projects.

 

Conformance-based Cloud Foundry certification

The moderator of the call, Troy Topnik from SUSE proposed conformance-based certification that is adopted from the existing Cloud Foundry Acceptance Tests (CATS). The motivation behind the proposal is to enable Cloud Foundry distributions to innovate while still being certifiable.

Troy Topnik

“As we move away from the traditional virtual machine-based cf-deployment release, and we now have two different Kubernetes implementations, the ship-this-code model of the certification process for Cloud Foundry certified distributions is going to be more difficult. We would have to keep adding optional pieces of code in order to guarantee roughly the same user experience. It would be much better to define that user experience by way of something that tests the API like Cloud Foundry Acceptance Tests.” —Troy Topnik, SUSE

According to Troy, now that there are two parallel projects for Cloud Foundry for Kubernetes, it’s time to look at creating API-driven conformance tests similar to the Kubernetes Software Conformance Certification. This way, certain components of Cloud Foundry could be implemented and still provide the same interface to end users.

The proposal is still in progress, and feedback is welcome.

 

Runtime PMC

Eric Malm

Eric Malm from VMware listed the following updates:

  • The Release Integration team delivered cf-deployment v14 and v15 to deal with certificate regeneration issues. The team is also working on image and secret management tracks for Cloud Foundry for Kubernetes.
  • The KubeCF team released version 2.6 and are now investigating kpack integration.
  • The CAPI and Services API teams requested comments on the Cloud Controller API v3 and CF CLI v7 commands.
  • The Eirini team is progressing on sidecars and CustomResourceDefinitions (CRDs). The team is also streamlining templates for Eirini v2.0.
  • The Networking team is working on more flexible pluggability of ingress routing and network systems around Contour.
  • The Logging and Metrics team is making progress towards log-cache performance and scalability.

Runtime PMC’s GitHub repo

 

Stratos

Troy announced the release of Stratos v4.3. Along with bug fixes, the new version includes the following improvements:

  • List headers now have highlight filters.
  • Helm chart lists now show which endpoint a chart comes from.
  • The filter of Helm Chart List Repo was enhanced.
  • Password input fields now include a reveal button to view the password.
  • Dark and light background colours were added to all the text areas.

Stratos’s GitHub repo | CF Extensions’ GitHub repo

 

What’s next?

Chip Childers

Chip Childers from the Cloud Foundry Foundation noted an ongoing redesign of the governance guidelines for the technical community. This was inspired by the recent changes in the ecosystem structure around Cloud Foundry. These changes also provided an opportunity to rethink how the technical community operates and revise the documentation to further improve the governance environment for the projects.

The first public meeting regarding the redesign is scheduled on December 4, 2020, at 11 a.m. EST. Anyone interested is welcome to join and provide feedback. Additional details are available in the dedicated GitHub repo.

Chris Clark

Chris Clark from the Cloud Foundry Foundation mentioned the upcoming hands-on lab around cf-protect. (Demoed to the community during the CAB meeting in October, this project represents a plugin for CF CLI that integrates data service backups with the SHIELD Cloud.) The lab will be scheduled some time in December with the exact date still under discussion.

Chris also wrote a bi-weekly technical round-up, featuring prominent release and other community updates.

The next CAB call will resume its regular schedule on December 16, 2020, at 8 a.m. PDT. Anyone interested can join Cloud Foundry’s CAB or cf-operators Slack channels.

 

Want details? Watch the video!


This blog post was written by Carlo Gutierrez and edited by Sophia Turol.