News

Cloud Foundry Adds Support for Spring Cloud Services, Azure, .NET and Docker

• By John K. Waters
• November 4, 2015

Pivotal Software Inc. has released a new version of its Cloud Foundry (PCF) platform with expanded support for Spring Cloud Services, .NET applications, Docker images, Microsoft Azure and several ALM toolchain products. With version 1.6 of its cloud-native platform, Pivotal is making a number of enhancements previewed earlier this year at O'Reilly's annual Open Source Convention, generally available.

For developers, the big news in this release is the expanded support for Spring Cloud Services, said James Watters, vice president of Product, Marketing and Ecosystems in Pivotal's Cloud Foundry group. "There's really nothing else like it in the world," he told ADTmag.

Pivotal's Spring Cloud Services integrates the Cloud Foundry-based NetflixOSS microservices framework with Pivotal's Java-based Spring programming tools. Netflix uses NetflixOSS, which is a version of the Spring Cloud OSS, to operate its global, on-demand video streaming service. With this release, Pivotal adds opinionated provisioning and lifecycle management to these components. ("Opinionated" provisioning encourages specific practices to increase ease of development.)

Spring Cloud Services is a secure, enterprise-ready distro of core NetflixOSS components, Watters explained. It allows developers and operators of cloud native distributed systems architectures to build microservices by adding a suite of production-ready services to the Pivotal Cloud Foundry Marketplace.

"Spring Cloud represents a full partnership with Netflix, and serves as an example of how focused we are on delivering the best experience possible to developers writing cloud native apps for an enterprise platform," Watters said.

This release also comes with native support for .NET applications, which can now run on PCF; native support for Docker images, currently in beta; and early access support for Microsoft's Azure cloud. PCF already supports Amazon Web Services, VMware vSphere, VMware vCloud Air and OpenStack.

".NET is the No. 2 enterprise language, and we have a lot of customers who are dying to use it with Cloud Foundry," Watters said. "This is the first enterprise-grade platform for cloud native apps to add .NET support."

PCF 1.6 also underscores Pivotal's ongoing partnering strategy with new relationships with GitLab, CloudBees and JFrog. Customers can use Pivotal's Tracker project management tool to integrate platform-managed versions of the GitLab source code repository, the Jenkins for continuous integration/continuous delivery server and the Artifactory binary repository manager.

GitLab is coming to the platform natively. "The cool thing about GitLab is they're like GitHub Enterprise, but open source," Watters said. "So, as we need features in the platform, we can contribute them."

"Enterprise companies are seeking control of their development tool chain as a source of competitive advantage," said Sytse Sijbrandij, GitLab co-founder and CEO, in a statement. "It is more flexible, more integrated, and more secure. The Pivotal and GitLab collaboration is a natural outcome of this larger trend, and we are thrilled to be the source control repository of choice for application development on Pivotal Cloud Foundry."

Pivotal's commercial version of the open source Cloud Foundry, launched in 2013, comes with a self-healing application runtime, support for open source programming languages and frameworks, deployment tools, centralized logging, health monitoring and an application services framework.

According to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the increasingly used term "cloud native" refers to application development that involves systems that are container packaged, dynamically managed and microservices-oriented.