Cloud Foundry is well poised for a surge in interest and usage. That’s what I came to think after the presentations and several discussions with attendees at Cloud Foundry Day last week.
Here’s why:
Developer Experience Takes Center Stage Again
In the opening talk, Purnima Padmanabhan, the GM of the Tanzu Division of Broadcom reiterated that Cloud Foundry is at the core of Tanzu Platform. Over the past year I’ve seen this focus inside Tanzu first hand: we’re putting all of our attention on supporting developers with the platform they need to build and run applications. And that explains why Cloud Foundry is at the center of what we’re doing.
Cloud Foundry is for developers, and developers are once again going to lead digital transformation initiatives. This time, it’s the transformation to using AI-infused applications. I know it seems like starry-eyed hype at this point, but adding AI-driven features to applications is driving a level of interest in application development that I haven’t seen in a long time.
On the last panel of the day, Nick Kuhn, my colleague and the co-host of Cloud Foundry Weekly noted this exact trend when discussing a recent customer workshop: “We had 82 developers join a hands-on workshop doing live provisioning of CF spaces. And then using some of these new cool MCP things. They quoted that it was their largest CF workshop ever.”
Cloud Foundry Weekly recording at CF Day, photo by Danielle Burrow.
Platforms Speed Up AI ROI
The sense I get from conversations I’ve had is that most organizations are done with the first year of learning and experimenting with AI. Now, they’re ready to start working on and shipping “real” AI applications, across the enterprise.
You see this in surveys: a surprising amount of people are saying they haven’t achieved large enough ROI with AI applications. Yet, over and over in surveys you see that organizations are still investing in those AI projects, sometimes taking budget from existing IT projects. That interest in adding AI to applications is creating pull for application platforms. This means technology leaders are shifting attention and investment up the stack, away from infrastructure and back into application platforms.
As Greg Otto from Comcast put it during the the panel with Nick and others:
“The industry’s been distracted with things that are below the value line for our developers. And to see this resurgence of ‘Hey, wait, developer experience is the product. That is the thing.’ And we need to rally around that. Seeing that come back in fashion for the rest of the industry, it’s really awesome to see. And I really look forward to growing that passion and renewing that for a lot of folks that might have gotten lost along the way.”
From Infrastructure Obsession to Developer Value
Putting so much focus down the stack–and, yes, here I mean Kubernetes–has distracted us all from supporting applications developers for a long time. We’ve focused a lot more on operator experience than developer experience in recent years. The platform engineering crew has been steering the industry’s focus back to developers, re-explaining that operations should see developers as customers and treat the platform as a product. This was a great, proven idea many years ago, and it still works for those in the platform engineering community that have remembered or re-discovered it.
To put it in marketing terms, Cloud Foundry has been poorly positioned in recent years. Instead of being thought of as a developer platform built for the benefit of developers, it’s been positioned alongside infrastructure like Kubernetes. But, the two are very different things, looking to solve different problems for different people. Namely, Cloud Foundry is for developers.
Lowering Barriers to Entry
If Cloud Foundry is for developers, what’s holding developers back from using it more? Making Cloud Foundry quick and easy to install. And, here, I mean getting it up and running on a developer laptop in less than a day, even better, sometime between the morning meeting and starting to think about where to go to lunch.
Originally, Cloud Foundry was run as a cloud service, and ease of installation wasn’t really anywhere near the top of the list. As Cloud Foundry became more focused on self-managed modes of operating–mostly private and hybrid cloud–there’ve been a handful of projects to make it easy to install for developers. For the intended use of Cloud Foundry – to be used as the internal developer platform at large organizations, supporting numerous applications and developers–ease of install isn’t a big deal. One of my co-workers put it something like this: “you’re installing a cloud, you can’t expect that to be quick and easy.” For each organization, there’s numerous integrations and infrastructure layers to work with, all bumping along through extensive meetings with stakeholders and the operations people who manage each IT silo. Lots and lots of meetings.
However, gaining developer favor is critical for platform success, both in terms of popularity, but also just day-to-day use. That’s certainly helped with other platforms! While it’s understandable that your enterprise-grade platform will have an enterprise-grade installation experience, if a developer just wants to start messing around with a platform, that should be easy.
DaShaun Carter talks about a smaller CF foot-print, photo by Danielle Burrow.
At Cloud Foundry Day, the need for quick Cloud Foundry installs came up over and over. DaShaun Carter, went over using the Small Footprint Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry for smaller installs. While it’s not a laptop install, it’s what you could call a “basement level” install. It’s a slimmed down way to install Cloud Foundry to support just one or two applications.
I’m hoping that this year we see a lot more work like this. Now that I’m back into programming to explore using AI with role playing games, I could use a laptop-level platform to run AI services like running different models, running databases for memory and RAG…you know, all the AI services built into Tanzu Platform. Repositioning Cloud Foundry
If I may be permitted to talk about myself a bit, in my talk I offered up some marketing advice for Cloud Foundry. The main point was that we need to reposition Cloud Foundry as what it truly is: a developer platform. For too long, we’ve been positioned as an alternative to infrastructure platforms like Kubernetes, which has limited people’s understanding of Cloud Foundry.
Cloud Foundry exists above the infrastructure layer, intentionally hiding the exact infrastructure from developers. There’s containers, VMs, clouds, and even Kubernetes in Cloud Foundry based platforms like Tanzu Platform, sure. But the point of Cloud Foundry is to support developers. As Greg Otto said, above, “developer experience is the product!”
In contrast to infrastructure layers, we need to show people that Cloud Foundry is part of the enterprise application stack, supporting how organizations run day-to-day. The layers of infrastructure under Cloud Foundry makes running those applications possible, but Cloud Foundry makes building and running those applications easy. One tool here that came up is thinking about time to market and business improvement. Those are direct “business” benefits of Cloud Foundry because it’s a developer-focused platform, not just infrastructure.
The Community Spirit
Cloud Foundry was launched almost 15 years ago, in April of 2011. I’ve watched it evolve over those years, go through its ups and downs along with everything else in the IT world. Right now, the community and the project are in an excellent position to help developers and organizations that want to keep doing the day-to-day building and running of their applications. Cloud Foundry is also in a great position to help those developers and organizations start scaling up their AI-driven application development. From the start, Cloud Foundry has been built and run for developers. It’s an obvious choice for the wave of AI applications coming our way. After all, Cloud Foundry just works, and it’s been working for a long time.
