In early March we introduced our vision for the Cloud Foundry Open Platform-as-a-Service project at Pivotal, and laid out a strategy of furthering our broad ecosystem with deep engineering partnerships with external organizations.
“Adding full-time external committers has always been a goal of the team, and we are engaged with several organizations around putting dedicated resources on the extended engineering team”
As of today’s major collaboration announcement with IBM, we can now be explicit about one of the organizations we were already working with in March. Working with IBM and other external organizations over the last several months we have learned more about what it will take to scale our thriving community.
Together, we are taking the following steps to further grow the Cloud Foundry community and the success of its members.
The “Cloud Foundry” open source brand
The “Cloud Foundry” open source brand will be preserved from direct use in product names, in a similar way as the ‘Hadoop’ brand is preserved. Ingredient and functional attribution is still vital to spreading the community (example: “powered by Cloud Foundry”). We believe this is vital as Cloud Foundry will always be greater than any one vendor’s product or service offering.
Bringing the community together
With financial, marketing and engineering help from IBM we will be bringing the community together twice a year at a conference we have named “Platform.” With such a large community building on and around Cloud Foundry it is important to collaborate and plan ongoing roadmaps in person as well as online. We will be co-hosting the first event this September 8th and 9th in Santa Clara. We invite all members of the Cloud Foundry community to join us.
An ongoing advisory board
We will be naming key partners and customers to an ongoing advisory board to the project. IBM is the first ecosystem partner to be named to the board. Stay tuned for further announcements on this.
Agile development backlogs made public
Our ongoing agile development backlogs, executed through Pivotal tracker stories and epics will be made public soon. We will also encourage the community to document major new feature proposals for feedback on the mailing lists, such as was recently done for the new logging functionality. These real-time progress updates and documents will augment longer term roadmap discussions at the Platform conference.
The “Open Dojo” program
We have been piloting a new “Open Dojo” program, where external engineers are invited to work directly with Pivotal’s core Cloud Foundry engineering team. Over the past few months, IBM successfully participated in this program leading to the development of IBM Java and Liberty buildpack. We are welcoming several other large and small organizations to the program in the coming weeks.
It is an exciting time for the growth of Open Platform-as-a-service, and we look forward to seeing you at Platform conference this September in Santa Clara.
