Cloud Foundry 2019 North American Summit Begins in Philadelphia, Announces Project Eirini Ready for Early Adopters

Cloud Foundry Foundation, home to a family of interoperable open source projects for the enterprise, opened its North American Cloud Foundry Summit in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania today, with news from organizations including Engineer Better, IBM, Pivotal, Resilient Scale, SUSE, Stark & Wayne, Swisscom and many others. The 2019 North American Summit is taking place today through April 4 and is supported by Diamond sponsors Comcast and Pivotal, and Platinum sponsor IBM Cloud.

“We are excited to host Summit on the east coast again this year,” said Abby Kearns, Executive Director, Cloud Foundry Foundation. “This Summit will be focused on celebrating the momentum of our community, highlighting stories from open source contributors and Cloud Foundry users, as well as providers, integrators and service providers. This year’s Summit theme is ‘building the future’ which is exactly what our community is committed to doing.”

The Foundation announced findings from its most recent Global Perception Study in a report titled “Adaptation, Not Adoption, is the Key to Digital Transformation: Why IT Strategy Requires a Perpetual State of Change.” With more than half of companies surveyed putting mission-critical apps in the cloud, it’s clear that digital transformation is the new reality, and that companies must adapt to constant change to keep up.

The Foundation is pleased to announce Project Eirini is now passing the core functional tests that validate Cloud Foundry Application Runtime releases, with future work focused on production readiness and testing against hosted managed Kubernetes environments from various public cloud providers. Initially proposed by IBM, Eirini has full-time engineers from Google and Pivotal working on the project, in addition to continued contributions from IBM, SAP and SUSE. The software is now mature enough that early adopters have begun to deploy it into production environments. At the EU Summit in 2018, Cloud Foundry Foundation announced Project Eirini’s acceptance as an incubating project by the Application Runtime Project Management Committee, which oversees projects associated with the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime and their coordinated roadmaps. Eirini works to provide developers with the “cf push” experience that makes it easy to push an app to production on top of Kubernetes.

The Foundation is also pleased to announce its first two Certified Systems Integrators, following on the program’s launch in October at the European Summit. Each with at least ten Cloud Foundry Certified Developers on their teams, Accenture and HCL have demonstrated contributions to the Cloud Foundry community through contributing code, hosting meetups, Foundation membership and more. The Certification program is designed to help SIs, consultancies and professional services organizations highlight their expertise working with the Cloud Foundry family of technologies.

Foundation member news includes:

A collection of Foundation members, including Resilient Scale, Stark & Wayne and SuperOrbital, in addition to TechFlow, have joined together to form the Continuous Delivery Alliance. The Continuous Delivery Alliance aims to fix the DevSecOps challenges in government from contracting through implementation by bringing together a collective of professionals with deep expertise in technology and government contracting. The Alliance offers unparalleled expertise in technologies including Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, GCP and practices like continuous integration/ delivery and DevSecOps.
Altoros has released new versions of the Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) tiles for Jenkins, Elasticsearch, and Cassandra, upgrading BOSH stemcells and existing integrations. The updated Xenial stemcells help avoid exposure to security vulnerabilities, while integrations with new versions of products will enable enterprise users to enjoy the features of the latest stable releases. In April, migration to Xenial stemcells for the six PCF tiles created and maintained by Altoros, including an upcoming new release of the Heartbeat Cloud Foundry monitoring, will take place. PCF tiles are packaged tools that can be integrated into Pivotal Cloud Foundry, enabling developers to use third-party services.
Anynines announced the release of release of a9s Platform, a fully automated platform distribution comprising open source Cloud Foundry and the a9s Data Services, as well as on-demand Kubernetes. The platform allows users to leverage open source technologies to bootstrap fully automated production grade platform environments. Technical support and remote operation options are available.
EngineerBetter announced that “Control Tower” is the new name for “Concourse-Up,” the company’s enterprise tool for deploying and operating Concourse CI in a single command. Concourse CI is used heavily throughout the Cloud Foundry ecosystem. With its new name, Control Tower will be available through new distribution channels and brings with it new features including Google Cloud Platform support and full support for Concourse 5.
Evoila announced new service brokers, which provide software systems such as databases, message queues or log aggregators with standardization to speed up software development. The service brokers make it possible to run two environments, such as Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes, next to each other and share their service instances. The Open Service Broker API 2.15 will soon provide a higher independence of special platforms and improve asynchronous ordering processes. By developing these new service brokers, evoila is further expanding its commitment to the standardization of complex processes.
Grape Up announced its flagship product Cloudboostr can now be deployed on OpenStack. Integration with the new cloud infrastructure unlocks a broad range of opportunities for companies using on-prem OpenStack. Cloudboostr provides a complete enterprise-grade cloud stack ready in days, gives the freedom to choose the best suitable runtime for any needs, and reduces the risk of upgrade compatibility issues and the complexity of applying patches.
IBM announced the launch of an Eirini-based technology preview of its Cloud Foundry Enterprise Environment, available for self provisioning. IBM Cloud is working to simplify development and operations by bringing together Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, and Functions under one management umbrella to enable development teams to spend their valuable time coding to solve business problems. A major step towards that goal is Project Eirini, where IBM is leading the effort alongside other Foundation members SUSE, SAP, Pivotal and Google, to bring native, pluggable Kubernetes application container scheduling to Cloud Foundry. IBM is supporting Project Eirini to bring coordinated operations of Cloud Foundry application containers and those created by other means to the same Kubernetes cluster. This allows for easy and more secure communications between Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes applications, and unlocks the vast ecosystem of Kubernetes tooling and capabilities to both the Cloud Foundry developer and administrator.
Packet announced an Edge Access Program, providing commercial and open source users with free access to edge computing building blocks at a diverse range of venues and locations. Resources include API-driven x86 and Arm bare metal compute infrastructure; automated cloud interconnect to Azure, GCP and other public cloud ecosystems; and CBRS wireless through Federated Wireless.
Pivotal announced the release of Pivotal Cloud Foundry 2.5, a collection of enhancements to its flagship application platform, including weighted routing, a new feature enabled by Istio and Envoy.
Stark & Wayne announced the launch of their managed service cloud solution for Pivotal Cloud Foundry and other cloud native technologies. Benefits to managed service subscribers include lower operational costs, a greater focus on app development, faster time to market, and accelerated feedback loops, which leads to faster problem resolution and higher quality end products. Stark & Wayne also announced SHIELD v8.1, now in Tile form, for PCF Operations Manager customers. SHIELD is a flexible and secure data protection solution for cloud data systems. Built on AES-256 encryption with randomized keys, and leveraging native backup / restore mechanisms like Percona Xtrabackup and BBR, it allows operators to sleep well knowing their critical data is protected.
SUSE announced SUSE Cloud Application Platform 1.4, the first software distribution to introduce Cloud Foundry Application Runtime in an entirely Kubernetes-native architecture, will be available in April. SUSE Cloud Application Platform 1.4 includes a technology preview of Project Eirini that allows operators to take greater advantage of the widely adopted Kubernetes container scheduler. The new Kubernetes-native Eirini implementation deepens integration of Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry, further bringing the advanced Cloud Foundry developer experience to Kubernetes environments and giving users the ability to choose either Kubernetes or Diego as their container schedule. Whether customers choose Kubernetes or Diego, the developer experience is the same. SUSE Cloud Application Platform 1.4 furthers SUSE's commitment to supporting customers’ multi-cloud environments by adding support for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Google's managed Kubernetes service, in addition to existing cloud support for Amazon EKS and Azure AKS, on-premises support with SUSE CaaS Platform, and multi-cloud support bridged by the Stratos UI.
Swisscom announced new features of the Swisscom Application Cloud: true security with encryption plan for S3 dynamic storage and auto-scaling of applications based on the Cloud Foundry Platform Application Cloud from Swisscom. Swisscom continues to enhance its cloud with upcoming new features are waiting to be announced, which will be developed and made available by the strong commitment of the community.
TIBCO its market-leading API management platform, TIBCO Cloud(TM) Mashery, is now cloud native. The platform can now be deployed anywhere, including certified support for PKS to make Kubernetes deployments easy, and integration with DevOps tooling even easier. TIBCO also released new capabilities to create cloud native integration apps via its API-led integration offering TIBCO Cloud(TM) Integration and BusinessWorks(TM) Container Edition for Cloud Foundry Container Runtime and Pivotal Cloud Foundry 2.x.

Enterprise developers, architects, engineers and executives from around the world are expected to attend the Philadelphia Summit. Attendees will learn about Cloud Foundry from those who build and use it every day. They will join other developers, end users and CIOs to gain first-hand access to Cloud Foundry roadmaps, training and tutorials, and to see how others are using Cloud Foundry to support continuous innovation and application portability.

Today the first-ever Contributors Summit takes place to foster community among open source project contributors and enable technical roadmap discussions. Tuesday’s Hackathon winners will be announced on-stage during Thursday morning keynotes.

On Thursday, Cloud Foundry Foundation will host its annual diversity luncheon at Summit, which will feature a diverse line-up of speakers and panelists discussing digital accessibility, advocacy and mentorship, gender equity and more. This event is co-sponsored by IBM Cloud and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Find the full schedule here.

Cloud Foundry is an open source technology backed by the largest technology companies in the world, including Dell EMC, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Pivotal, SAP and SUSE, and is being used by leaders in manufacturing, telecommunications and financial services. Only Cloud Foundry delivers the velocity needed to continuously deliver apps at the speed of business. Cloud Foundry's container-based architecture runs apps in any language on your choice of cloud — Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack, VMware vSphere, and more. With a robust services ecosystem and simple integration with existing technologies, Cloud Foundry is the modern standard for mission critical apps for global organizations.


About Cloud Foundry Foundation
The Cloud Foundry Foundation is an independent non-profit open source organization formed to sustain the development, promotion and adoption of Cloud Foundry as the industry standard for delivering the best developer experiences to companies of all sizes. The Foundation projects include Cloud Foundry Application Runtime, Cloud Foundry Container Runtime, BOSH, Open Service Broker API, Eirini, CF Containerization, Abacus, CF-Local, CredHub, ServiceFabrik, Stratos and more. Cloud Foundry makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications, and is used by more than half the Fortune 500, representing nearly $15 trillion in combined revenue. Cloud Foundry is hosted by The Linux Foundation and is an Apache 2.0 licensed project available on Github: https://github.com/cloudfoundry. To learn more, visit: http://www.cloudfoundry.org.


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Contact:
Martha de Monclin
Bijou PR for the Cloud Foundry Foundation
martha@bijoupr.com
T: +44 (0)777 168 2434