Cloud Foundry Foundation Advances Korifi PaaS for Kubernetes

This week at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe conference, Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF) made available an update to the Korifi edition of its open source Kubernetes-based platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment that adds automatic cleanup of unused resources and improved logging, among other capabilities.

Ram Iyengar, chief evangelist for the CFF, says version 0.7 of Korifi is a significant step toward achieving a 1.0 release of Korifi, hopefully before the end of the year.

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Korifi is designed to enable IT organizations to deploy a less opinionated instance for the Cloud Foundry PaaS atop Kubernetes that consumes much fewer infrastructure resources. The original version of the Cloud Foundry PaaS required more than 40 virtual machines to run. Korifi makes it much simpler to deploy the same instance of the Cloud Foundry PaaS on a developer’s laptop as in the cloud.

Improving the developer experience in Kubernetes environments has become a critical goal. There are today roughly 7 million developers that have some level of Kubernetes expertise out of a total population of well over 50 million developers. If organizations want to increase the pace at which cloud-native applications are being developed and deployed, they will need to make Kubernetes platforms more accessible.

Iyengar says most developers are looking for platforms that abstract as much infrastructure complexity as possible to enable them to focus most of their time on writing business logic.

In general, PaaS environments have fallen in and out of fashion over the years. Many organizations have shied away from a PaaS environment because they are too opinionated—in the sense that historically they have not allowed developers to add tools as they best see fit. However, organizations that have built their own development platforms have assumed the burden of maintaining them. With Korifi, the CFF is now trying to strike a balance between the separation of concerns that developers and IT operations team have by making available a PaaS environment that is more customizable.

Kubernetes, at its core, is a platform for building other platforms that make it more accessible to developers and IT administrators alike. There are not enough software engineers available to manage Kubernetes infrastructure alongside DevOps workflows, so the need to find an alternative approach to deploying and maintaining a Kubernetes environment has become a crucial issue.

There are, of course, no shortage of development tools and platforms that are in varying stages of maturity for building cloud-native applications. Many of the applications being built and deployed are not always fit for purpose for that platform. In many cases, developers may be better off using, for example, a serverless computing platform to build and deploy less complex applications that don’t necessarily need to scale instead of a web-scale application that is better suited for Kubernetes.

One way or another, however, cloud-native applications running on Kubernetes clusters are now part of the enterprise IT firmament. The issue now is determining how best to employ a platform that is as complex as it is powerful.