The Cloud Foundry Foundation is changing. It’s evolving. And change can often be intimidating. With the departure of Chip Childers and the restructuring of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, there might be many users who feel panicked because of their reliance on Cloud Foundry and also the investment they have made into this technology. Should they worry? Should they panic? Julian Fischer, CEO and founder of anynines, addresses some of these concerns.

Guest: Julian Fischer (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Company: anynines (Twitter)

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Swapnil Bhartiya: If we just look at Cloud Foundry, the existing users are people who have invested resources, or they have built infrastructure and the whole team’s around them. Should they worry? Should they panic? What is the message to them?

Julian Fischer: Well, I don’t think that panic is somehow necessary. The customers who have adapted to Cloud Foundry over the years, they have a certain weight and these organizations, they won’t just let technologies such as Cloud Foundry go away. I don’t think it is possible because where Cloud Foundry has been adopted successfully, there are thousands of applications and thousands of service instances running like the technology that Cloud Foundry provides. And as I said earlier, the economy of scale is yet to be reached by any other technology. Like there is no migration path into Kubernetes tooling that will allow a large organization, a large Cloud Foundry environment to be transformed into Kubernetes environment easily. And it won’t be able to achieve with anything that Cloud Foundry will deliver on top of Kubernetes in the very near future. So I believe we need to distinguish two discussions.

What happens to classic Cloud Foundry environments, especially if they have larger scales. Well, they will be continued to be maintained. We, as a company, for example, will maintain Cloud Foundry. We will operate them. We will help to keep them secure as good as we can for, for a prolonged amount of time. So there’s absolutely no reason to panic there. I’m also pretty sure that whoever has sponsored Cloud Foundry in the past, they will have the same problem and they can’t just go away and move on because there are so many applications and organizations relying on that technology. We are not talking about something that you can easily just abandoned. And I think it’s not meaningful to do that. And that gives room and time to let Cloud Foundry for Kubernetes and maybe even Kubernetes itself evolve a bit so that it becomes a viable alternative.

So just to give you an example, if you create large group [inaudible 00:10:51] environments, it’s very likely to have multiple Kubernetes clusters. We’ve mentioned that in earlier conversations, so that Federation of Kubernetes clusters and making sense of a Federation of Kubernetes clusters, that is essential point that needs to be solved before it becomes a viable alternative to Cloud Foundry. And while some commercial products try to do that, I’m still waiting for anything that lives up to the standards. For example, when it comes to operational ease, once you set up yourself in Cloud Foundry operating huge environments has been such a pleasure. And I’m still waiting for anything that can live up to these standards.

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