Cloud Foundry Advisory Board Meeting, Dec 2020: сf-for-k8s Using Helm

by Carlo GutierrezDecember 17, 2020
The new project aims to provide a method for quickly installing Cloud Foundry for Kubernetes using Helm charts.

This year’s final Cloud Foundry Community Advisory Board (CAB) meeting featured a demo of installing Cloud Foundry for Kubernetes (cf-for-k8s) using Helm charts. As usual, development updates around the ecosystem projects were also highlighted. The call was moderated by Troy Topnik from SUSE.

 

Installing cf-for-k8s with Helm

Launched back in November 2019, cf-for-k8s combines prominent Cloud Foundry developer APIs with Kubernetes, Istio, and other open-source technologies. The project was designed to improve developer experience for organizations running Kubernetes.

James Hunt of Stark & Wayne presented a new project that uses Helm charts to install cf-for-k8s. For three months, James and the team have been trying out this installation method to evaluate cf-for-k8s for a variety of scenarios where an environment needs to be set up quickly. These scenarios include hands-on labs, demos for potential customers, and showing off research and development once Cloud Foundry is on top of Kubernetes.

James Hunt

“One of the things that we’ve been experimenting with is instead of running Docker Hub for the image registry, we just spin the image registry on the Kubernetes cluster and wire that to Cloud Foundry for Kubernetes, so it’s all self-contained. At this point, we’re looking at these not as disposable Cloud Foundries, but ephemeral Cloud Foundries. I can spin one up, do a demo, and not have to clean up Docker Hub.” —James Hunt, Stark & Wayne

A demo on installing cf-for-k8s using Helm

The project is still in the experimental phase and is not meant for production.

install-cf4k8s GitHub repo | cf-for-k8s GitHub repo

 

Runtime PMC

Eric Malm

Eric Malm from VMware provided the following updates:

  • The CLI team released CLI v7.2.0 with improvements to the revisions and rollback commands.
  • The Release Integration team delivered cf-deployment v15.4.0 with experimental bionic stemcell support. The team also updated cf-for-k8s v1.1.0.
  • The KubeCF team released KubeCF v2.7.1 that supports generic external blobstores.
  • The CAPI and Services API teams are finalizing the endpoints for Cloud Controller API v3. Once finalized, v2 is expected to be supported well into 2021, while the teams transition to v3.
  • The Eirini team delivered Eirini v2. The team is preparing to work on additional custom resource definitions.
  • The Networking team is progressing on Contour pluggability.
  • The Logging and Metrics team is continuing to work on log-cache performance and scalability.

Runtime PMC’s GitHub repo

 

CF Extensions

Troy Topnik

Troy Topnik from SUSE announced that Cloud Service Broker will be added to CF Extensions. The service broker is built to be used with Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes. It is an extension of the Google Cloud Platform Service Broker and relies on Brokerpaks to expose services.

CF Extensions’ GitHub repo | Cloud Service Broker’s GitHub repo

 

Foundation updates

Chris Clark

As events are winding down for the holidays, Chris Clark from the Cloud Foundry Foundation mentioned that contributor license agreements will need to be re-signed. The Foundation has also been running various hands-on labs including CF Protect and Try Cloud Foundry. He also noted that the Paketo team is planning to conduct a hands-on lab next year.

Chris’s latest bi-weekly technical round-up features notable releases and dates for the last few events of the year. In particular, CF Technical Governance meeting will take place on December 18 and CF for Kubernetes SIG meeting on December 22.

The first CAB call next year is tentatively scheduled on January 20, 2021, at 8 a.m. PDT. Anyone interested can join Cloud Foundry’s CAB or cf-operators Slack channels.