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Every tech conference, it seems, ends up becoming a Kubernetes conference. We saw this last week at Anaconda’s AnacondaCon and the week before with Nvidia’s GPU Technology ConferenceView in browser »
The New Stack Update

ISSUE 113: Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes, Round 2

Talk Talk Talk

“I think there is a misconception that green field applications are actually green field. [Often] developers who are writing the new web app are interacting with a legacy system. All the data they need is somewhere else.”

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Chip Childers, CTO Cloud Foundry
Add It Up
Saving Time and Money With Application Platforms
The April 2018 Cloud Foundry User Survey reports that the average respondent saved 10 weeks per application development lifecycle. Furthermore, 54 percent reported or more per application lifecycle. No one reported increased costs, but that was because they weren’t given the option to report that in the survey.

The conclusion that Cloud Foundry users are reducing development time and reducing costs is supported by the findings in many other studies. This just proves that application platforms are doing what they claim to do. For example, among the nine case studies IDC conducted for The Business Value of Red Hat OpenShift, application development lifecycles declined from 28 to 10 weeks after OpenShift adoption.
 
Other types of application platforms also reduce the time needed to create an application. For example, a survey by OutSystems reports that users of low-code platforms were 20 percentage points more likely to deliver a complete mobile application in less than six months.
 
While platforms produce great benefits, so do the associated practices that are often initiated alongside the platforms deployment. As we have noted in the past, adoption of DevOps processes and microservices architectures is strongly correlated with continuous delivery and container deployment platforms. The 2017 State of DevOps Report shows that DevOps helps IT performance by reducing, deployment frequency, lead time for changes, MTTR and the rate of change failure. That report and a survey commissioned by CA Technologies are just two reports that show that the time savings can have a direct impact on the businesses by making product development more effective.
What's Happening

When TNS founder Alex Williams met with Ben Golub and Solomon Hykes at the Doug Fir in Portland, it was 2013 and OSCON was buzzing. Golub had found a home with Docker as CEO, following a successful run leading Gluster, the storage company that sold to Red Hat.

Today, Golub is now the interim CEO at Storj and Hykes just a few weeks ago left Docker. They were leaders in opening the market, and since 2013 we know that containers have been widely adopted. The question now is about application-oriented architectures and the resources that they run on. That is a topic that goes beyond containers and into discussions about application infrastructure and the influence of data architectures for building new predictive-modeling systems.

Ben Golub: From Storage to Docker and Back to Storage but now with Blockchain

Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes, Round 2

Every tech conference, it seems, ends up becoming a Kubernetes conference. We saw this last week at Anaconda’s AnacondaCon and the week before with Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference. And this week, we are holed up in Boston for the annual Cloud Foundry Summit, and one of the big items for discussion is the many ways this platform-as-a-service can mesh with everyone’s favorite open source container orchestration software.

At first, we wondered what the fuss was about. Sure, it made sense for Kubernetes to be used as a deployment mechanism for Cloud Foundry, which would be handy both for admins and the ISVs. But Kubernetes also offers value for the developer already on Cloud Foundry. In particular, it could allow them to more easily access system-wide primitives, such as authentication.

With this in mind, one of the more surprising announcements at the conference was the debut of the SUSE Cloud Application Platform, which brings a number of new innovations. First of all, it is the first Cloud Foundry distribution that is distributed on containers. Including this platform, there are only eight certified Cloud Foundry distributions, and six of them are managed services. The only other Cloud Foundry distribution for purchase is from Pivotal, which still packages the software in virtual machines. SUSE has also released a packaged distribution of Cloud Foundry, which provides some choice for enterprises who are not interested in a managed service.

The other intriguing aspect of the SUSE Cloud Application Platform is that it includes a fully-integrated copy of Kubernetes. At first, we thought SUSE used Kubernetes as a tool only to run and manage its Cloud Foundry, but it turns out that it offers end users benefits as well. With both a commercially supported Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry, end-users can deploy Cloud Foundry to get their programmers coding quickly, but also use Kubernetes to run those containerized applications that don’t fit neatly into the Cloud Foundry model. It sounds like the SUSE Cloud Application Platform may provide an easy way for organizations that want to get into this cloud-native world who before may have thought the bar to be too high.

Meet Gloo, the ‘Function Gateway’ That Unifies Legacy APIs, Microservices, and Serverless

Solo wants to unify all IT operations under a single common denominator, the function. With all an organization’s services, monolithic applications APIs and serverless calls exposed as functions on the same data plane, the enterprise can take advantage of a unified set of management and monitoring tools, explained Solo founder Idit Levine. “There’s a lot of magic there.”

Docker Enterprise Edition 2.0 Embraces Kubernetes

Back in October, Docker shifted to support the Kubernetes container orchestration software, in addition to its own orchestrator, Swarm. This week, the company has fully integrated Kubernetes into its Docker Enterprise Edition, with the release of version 2.0. The platform will continue to support Swarm, but will now allow users to choose between the two schedulers, and to take advantage of existing Docker EE features in Kubernetes for the first time.

A Tradition Continues: The International Obfuscated C Code Contest

Very few pieces of geek culture have lasted for 34 years. But back in 1984, two overworked programmers established a long-standing tradition that seems to have sprung up organically from their own common travails. It gradually snowballed into a community, a legend, and an accidentally-educational endeavor that’s always both unpredictable and wildly entertaining. And so here we are in 2018 enjoying yet another edition of the International Obfuscated C Code Competition.

Party On

Post Cloud Foundry Summit keynote discussions on the show floor with Benjamin Gandon, CEO of GStack, Abby Kearns, executive director of Cloud Foundry and Thomas Di Giacomo, CTO of Suse.

Alex Williams is catching up with Intel’s Jeff Ruby and Weaveworks’ Sonja Schweigert on the show floor of Cloud Foundry Summit. 

On The Road
ChefConf 2018 // MAY 24, 2018 // THE HYATT REGENCY CHICAGO

MAY 24, 2018 // THE HYATT REGENCY CHICAGO

ChefConf 2018
Change can be slow, laborious. It’s especially grinding when it slows to such a state that it becomes an impediment to addressing market changes. People are digitally educated. They use their phones and laptops as tools. How does this digitally-conscious culture affect how customers think about application development, deployment and management? What are the continuous development practices needed to meet the demand for faster app development? What is the change customers need so they can quickly adapt to market change? Register Now!
FREE EBOOK: Learn about patterns and deployment use cases for Kubernetes.
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