Donated to the Foundation in June by Pivotal and Google, the project was built to expand choice for Cloud Foundry’s massive enterprise user base. Cloud Foundry users can now use Container Runtime to deploy Kubernetes or Application Runtime (previously Elastic Runtime) for a Cloud Application Platform. In either case, BOSH underpins infrastructure provisioning for both Cloud Foundry runtimes.
“Kudos to the great Cloud Foundry community and the Foundation for being able to rapidly embrace and incorporate Kubernetes with the Kubo project -- now Container Runtime -- to take this next evolutionary step for Container Orchestration," said Marco Hochstrasser, Head of Application Cloud, Swisscom. “Swisscom sees great opportunities in working with this technology in the future.”
Container Runtime can also now claim default support for Istio, with ongoing compatibility testing planned as both projects continue to evolve. In addition, default support for persistence of Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Vsphere are now available for the Container Runtime project.
Application Runtime is an app-centric platform that simplifies the entire development lifecycle. Container Runtime enhances Cloud Foundry’s capabilities by using some of its best and most unique components—such as BOSH, which enables a uniform way to instantiate, deploy and manage highly available Kubernetes clusters on any cloud.
“The technology has progressed quickly—after only four months in incubation, the first commercial offering has already been launched. Container Runtime expands the capabilities of Cloud Foundry beyond Application Runtime, giving enterprises more options to take advantage of cloud-native best practices,” said Abby Kearns, Executive Director, Cloud Foundry Foundation. “With nearly 70 percent of enterprises using containers in some capacity, choice is critical. This expansion enables businesses to take advantage of the power of Kubernetes combined with BOSH, an open source, enterprise-grade management tool."
A recent
study by Cloud Foundry Foundation found that despite continued buzz around containers, only 25 percent of enterprise companies actually use them in production, a negligible rise of only three percent from 2016.
Both Cloud Foundry Application Runtime and Container Runtime are built with developers in mind, providing flexibility to run apps in any language or framework on any cloud. This flexibility extends to services as well, thanks to the Open Service Broker API, which makes it easy to integrate the services your apps need to run—on both Application Runtime and Container Runtime.
“The initial setup and operations of Kubernetes can be challenging,” said Fintan Ryan, a RedMonk analyst. “Cloud Foundry Container Runtime gives developers and operators a simple method to create a highly available Kubernetes environment with BOSH and avoid many of the pitfalls users initially encounter.”
Identifying the need for a container service that would fit alongside Cloud Foundry Application Runtime, Pivotal and Google collaborated on this project before donating it to the Foundation. The first commercial distribution of Container Runtime was
recently announced, with more expected to arrive soon.
