Cloud Foundry Advisory Board Meeting, Oct 2019: the Blacksmith Project

by Carlo GutierrezOctober 17, 2019
Blacksmith enables app developers to create services on demand, while relieving operators from having to constantly spin services.

Dr. Max

This month’s Cloud Foundry Community Advisory Board (CAB) meeting focused on the Blacksmith community project. Michael Maximilien (a.k.a. Dr. Max) of IBM moderated the call and gave a reminder that App Autoscaler, Buildpacks, and Stratos have all graduated from incubation. The call also featured regular updates from various members of the development teams and from the Cloud Foundry Foundation.

App Autoscaler’s GitHub repo | Buildpack’s GitHub repo | Stratos’s GitHub repo

 

Data services on demand

Dr. Xiujiao Gao

Blacksmith creates a way to deploy data services on demand via the Open Service Broker API. According to Dr. Xiujiao Gao of Stark & Wayne, Blacksmith is a service broker that provides application developers with on-demand and dedicated deployments of data services.

Blacksmith utilizes Forges—templates that tell Blacksmith how to deploy a service. This automatically creates and binds data services to cloud applications, allowing developers to focus on their work, while relieving operators from having to constantly spin services.

During the call, Dr. Gao gave a demonstration of Blacksmith and explained how to use Forges.

Deploying a PostgreSQL service (Source: CAB meeting)

Blacksmith’s GitHub repo

 

Runtime PMC

Eric Malm

Eric Malm of Pivotal provided the following updates:

  • cf-deployment v12 was released.
  • The CF CLI v6.46.1 and v7 beta 26 were released.
  • The CAPI team released support for buildpack-provided sidecars.
  • The Loggregator team is working on shared-nothing architecture changes.
  • The Networking team is working on components to translate Cloud Foundry routes into Istio configurations on Kubernetes for Eirini integration.
  • The Diego and Garden teams are collaborating to enable monitoring of the metrics around CPU usage spikes.
  • The UAA team is removing the dependence on the Gorouter stick session routing in order to enable support for other load balancers.

Runtime PMC’s GitHub repo

 

BOSH

Morgan Fine

Morgan Fine of Pivotal reported the following developments:

  • The BOSH Director and Systems teams were merged again.
  • More stemcell pipeline improvements are coming up.
  • The BOSH team is continuing to work on removing blobstore credentials form VMS by using signed URLs.
  • The team is exploring how to expose more Director metrics for operators to monitor.

BOSH’s GitHub repo

 

CF Foundation updates

Swarna Podila

Swarna Podila noted that the Cloud Foundry Foundation will be co-hosting the upcoming Serverless Practitioners Summit at Kubecon. The schedule will be posted at a later date.

She also mentioned that the Cloud Foundry for Kubernetes special interest group (SIG) meetings, which occured last on October 15, will continue to take place every other Tuesday at 8:30 a.m. Pacific Time. The complete schedule can be found in the community calendar.

The next CAB call is scheduled for Wednesday, November 20. The call will start at 8 a.m. Pacific Time. Anyone interested can join Cloud Foundry’s CAB Slack channel.


This post was written by Carlo Guiterrez, edited by Sophia Turol and Alex Khizhnyak.