At the Cloud Foundry summit in The Hague, IBM presented today the Cloud Foundry Enterprise Environment on Red Hat's OpenShift platform.
For a long time, the open-source Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a-Service ecosystem and Red Hat’s Kubernetes-centric OpenShift were considered rivals, as both tools competed in the enterprise space enterprises looking to modernize application . But a lot has changed in recent years. On the technical side, Cloud Foundry has begun to embrace Kubernetes as an option for application development and as a way to commercialize and operate Cloud Foundry itself.
From the business side, the acquisition of Red Hat by IBM has brought some changes. IBM supports Cloud Foundry as a top-tier member, while Red Hat bets on its own platform. Now that the acquisition has closed, it may not be a surprise that IBM is working to integrate Cloud Foundry into Red Hat's platform.
For now, this work is still officially a technology experiment, but what we understand is that IBM plans to turn it into a fully supported project that will give Cloud Foundry users the ability to develop their application on OpenShift, while OpenShift customers can offer developers the Cloud Foundry experience.
“It’s another piece of evidence that these things work really well together,” CTOChip Childers told me ahead of today’s announcement. “This is the programming expertise that the CF community brings, and in IBM’s case, this is a really good commercialization story.”
While Cloud Foundry isn't as widely deployed as it was in previous years, it remains one of the most widely used development platforms in large enterprises. According to the latest Cloud Foundry Foundation user survey, companies that already use it continue to move more development work to the platform.
“As enterprises move toward digital transformation and developers drive innovation in cloud-native environments, one thing is very clear: they are turning to Cloud Foundry as a proven, agile, and flexible platform,” said Abby Kearns, executive director of the Cloud Foundry Foundation.
Also at this week's Summit, Pivotal (which is in the process of acquiring VMware) is launching the alpha version of its Pivotal Application Service (PAS) on Kubernetes, while Swisscom, a supporter of Cloud Foundry, is launching a very basic update to its Cloud Application.
