CFF Aims to Meld PaaS and Kubernetes Management

The Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF) in collaboration with SUSE today announced an update to the Stratos user interface project that will provide a foundation for unifying the management experience across the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and Kubernetes.

Chip Childers, executive director for the CFF, said version 4.0 of a project that was originally developed by SUSE is a core element of the organization’s ongoing efforts to meld the Cloud Foundry PaaS and Kubernetes. It is used primarily today to enable IT teams to employ a web-based console to manage Cloud Foundry applications and platforms.

Childers said Stratos 4.0 will provide the foundation for extending Stratos to blend the management of other platforms and share instances of the UI via a npm registry. Stratos can already be deployed as an application on Cloud Foundry, on Kubernetes clusters using Helm or locally in a Docker container.

Other enhancements include the addition of new icons and improved sizing within the context of a desktop browser. The latest version of the UI has also been updated to support Angular 9.0, a framework designed to make it easier to localize instances of Stratos. Overall, the UI is now much more responsive, says Childers.

Work has also begun on version 3 of the Stratos application programming interface (API), through which additional functionality will be exposed. That API will also make it easier to build plug-ins, notes Childers.

The CFF is racing to rehost a Cloud Foundry PaaS that is widely employed in enterprise IT environments on Kubernetes. The goal is to make the consumption of IT infrastructure more efficient in addition to making it easier to scale the consumption of those resources up and down as needed. The Cloud Foundry PaaS today is primarily deployed on virtual machines.

In the meantime, the CFF continues to work toward making it possible to build and deploy both monolithic and microservices-based applications on the same platform. Rather than requiring IT teams to acquire a separate platform for microservices-based applications based on containers, the CFF is moving to extend the application developer experience provided by the Cloud Foundry PaaS.

Childers says UI frameworks matter because, depending on the task, developers will often switch back and forth between UIs and command-line interfaces (CLIs). In fact, at least subconsciously developers tend to make assessments concerning the vibrancy of a platform based on how much new functionality is regularly exposed via the UI.

In the meantime, the race to capture the hearts and minds of developers of container applications is on. From desktop tools to entire PaaS environments, there is now no shortage of options. As those applications wind their way through the DevOps application and deployment process, it’s now only a matter of time before the number of Kubernetes clusters required to run them increases exponentially.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

Mike Vizard has 1615 posts and counting. See all posts by Mike Vizard