Eirini and CF Containerization: a field guide

The recent Cloud Foundry Summit in Philadelphia featured two talks that were crucial to understanding the future of Cloud Foundry as it relates to Kubernetes.

• “Kube” your Enthusiasm: Bringing Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes Together with Project Eirini by Dr. Julz from IBM and Mario Nitchev from SAP and,
• A Native Kube Operator Tailored for Cloud Foundry by myself and Enrique Encalada from IBM.

They were scheduled at the same time right across the hall from one another, which was a shame because it split an audience that might have liked to attend both. Including me! I really wanted to see the latest iteration of Julz and Mario’s excellent talk.

“Oh, you mean like Eirini?”

But there’s another problem. In talking to people in the hallways and at the SUSE booth, we found that there was considerable confusion about what the Eirini and CF Containerization projects were responsible for. Specifically, many people thought that Eirini was the project for containerizing the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime.

Since the Eirini demos at the Summit were all running in containerized deployments — either SUSE Cloud Application Platform (CAP) or IBM Cloud Foundry Enterprise Environment (CFEE) — I can see why it was confusing.

For the record:

• Eirini runs Cloud Foundry user applications in Kubernetes. Here’s where that project lives: https://github.com/cloudfoundry-incubator/eirini
• CF Containerization (AKA cf-operator) runs Cloud Foundry itself in Kubernetes. Here’s where that project lives: https://github.com/cloudfoundry-incubator/cf-operator

Update! The CF Containerization project is now known as Cloud Foundry Quarks

If you’re interested in this kind of thing, chances are you’ve already seen the Eirini stuff since they’ve been getting lots of well deserved visibility. You may not have seen this though:

Why should you care?

Are you a Cloud Foundry user? You shouldn’t care.

You’ll interact with the Cloud Foundry API using the same tools and techniques, no matter where or how it runs.

Are you a Cloud Foundry operator? This might be important to you.

You can deploy Cloud Foundry in Kubernetes rather than beside it. You can start with a small scale cluster that can scale up easily as your usage increases. You might learn a bit about how complex workloads are orchestrated on Kubernetes, but you won’t need a lot of that knowledge to get started.

Are you a Kubernetes operator? You should really care about this.

This deployment model lets you run the most popular and powerful Platform-as-a-Service software using the knowledge you already have and the tools you are familiar with. It means you can expose an interface to end user developers that has a dramatically smaller learning curve than Kubernetes itself. It means you can define an opinionated workflow for development teams without having to build it from scratch.

How to see it in action

Though both projects are works in progress, you can try them yourself. SUSE Cloud Application Platform has been running containerized on Kubernetes since its 1.0 release early last year. The upcoming 1.4 release will have Eirini available as a tech preview and the CF Containerization team’s cf-operator work is scheduled to land in a 2.0 release later this year.

Contact SUSE or one of our partners to get started with SUSE Cloud Application Platform.