"Developers are wasting their time with Kubernetes alone!"

At Open Source India 2024, Ram Iyengar, Chief Evangelist, Cloud Foundry Foundation, raised a few eyebrows with his cogent arguments about ways to manage and deploy infrastructure. OSFY's Yashasvini Razdan got some exclusive takes on alternatives for scalable application deployment and management, and the role of Cloud Foundry Foundation in this business....

- Yashasvini Razdan

Q. Could you tell me what is the Cloud Foundry Foundation and how does it support open source development?

A. The Cloud Foundry Foundation is a non-profit that basically exists to provide vendor neutral governance around the Cloud Foundry open source project as well as a lot of projects that surround the Cloud Foundry project within the ecosystem. Cloud Foundry has been an open source project for a little over 10 years now, which is like the Jurassic Age in terms of software and they've been a leading proponent of open source alternatives to good projects in the entire commercial ecosystem.

Q. How is the Cloud Foundry Flows the Cloud Foundry Linux Foundation?

A. The Cloud Foundry Foundation came together around 2015. Originally, it was part of a project at a company called Pivotal, which was spun off from VMware. Over time, Pivotal was reacquired by VMware. During this period, several major companies, like IBM, SUSE, Google, and SAP, adopted Cloud Foundry as their preferred cloud platform. This widespread adoption created a need for a vendor-neutral, independent open source body, leading to the establishment of the Cloud Foundry Foundation.

Fast forward seven or eight years, and the Cloud Foundry community began to shrink, in part due to the emergence of Docker, Kubernetes, and other technologies that attracted developers' attention. As the community scaled down, there was less need for an independent body, and the foundation transitioned to become a directed fund under the Linux Foundation. Today, it operates as one of many projects within the Linux Foundation.

Q. How big is this community?

A. It's hard to tell, but there are a little over 20,000 people on our Slack.

Q. What role do these partnerships and collaborations play in Cloud Foundry's initiative?