So let’s dissect the press release in our customary style:
San Francisco, November 2, 2015 – Pivotal®, the company accelerating digital transformation for enterprises, today announced a new release of Pivotal Cloud Foundry, the comprehensive Cloud Native platform that unifies the software delivery process with an integrated application framework, platform runtime, and infrastructure automation. Pivotal Cloud Foundry now includes expanded support for Spring Cloud Services, Microsoft Azure, .NET applications, Docker images, and application lifecycle management. With these enhancements, Pivotal further enables businesses to rapidly build, deploy, and operate Cloud Native applications on a wide choice of hosted, public, and private clouds.
MyPOV – Good summary to start the press release – hitting all the key new capabilities, we will dissect and comment below. But worth to mention the ‘cloud native’ positioning here, will be interesting to see if Pivotal can pull that association between cloud native and its products of.
“The days of monolithic technologies are ending. Today’s modern enterprises practice agile software development with Cloud Native tools, process, and culture that can respond to speed of market and customer demand,” said James Watters, vice president and general manager, Cloud Platform Group, Pivotal. “Pivotal Cloud Foundry delivers a comprehensive Cloud Native application development and operations environment so you can spend time building business value instead of your IT infrastructure.”
MyPOV – Good quote by Waters, hitting the right value proposition of CloudFoundry, though the tool itself is also monolithic – in the sense of offering one way to build software.
Integrated Microservices with Spring Cloud Services
Based on the popular Spring Cloud OSS, which is used by Netflix to operate its global, on-demand video streaming service, Spring Cloud Services for Pivotal Cloud Foundry goes one step further to provide opinionated provisioning and lifecycle management to these components.
The first and only secure, enterprise-ready distribution of core Netflix OSS components, Spring Cloud Services enables developers and operators of Cloud Native distributed systems architectures to quickly and easily build microservices by adding a suite of production-ready services to the Pivotal Cloud Foundry marketplace. Spring Cloud Services allows developers to focus on delivering business value and defers the deployment and management of important distributed systems patterns such as application configuration, service discovery, and fault-tolerance to the Pivotal Cloud Foundry platform.
MyPOV – Cloud Foundry needed a productivity framework to accelerate time to market for solutions build with the product. Nothing lies closer than using the venerable spring framework, souped up with the Netflix OSS components. A good move for the product, but like all productivity tools, it comes with the addition of increased dependency. We expect Pivotal customers to not be too concerned with this dependency, but they should be making aware tradeoffs.
Native Support for .NET Applications
Thanks to the next-generation runtime shipping in this latest release, .NET applications can now run on Pivotal Cloud Foundry. With this expanded support for .NET, enterprises can support a heterogeneous environment consisting of both Linux-based and Windows-based applications. .NET applications will run natively on Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V virtual machines, and Pivotal Cloud Foundry can manage applications with the same commands and many of the same consistent Day 2 operational benefits as existing applications.
MyPOV – This is a key move by Microsoft and Pivotal to avoid developers of .Net applications to have to go back and rebuild these .Net apps as their first order of business. Instead Microsoft and now Pivotal gives developers the opportunity to operate these older .Net applications in conjunction with the next generation applications they want to build (and the vendors want them to build). Lastly it is the ultimate proof point of investment protection for .Net applications, a promise Microsoft has made over a decade ago and is honoring today.
Native Support for Docker Images
Docker applications can now leverage the built in Pivotal Cloud Foundry platform capabilities, such as scheduling, health management, load balancing, enterprise identity, logging, and multi-cloud support. Now in beta, native Docker image support is made possible by the new elastic runtime and makes Pivotal Cloud Foundry the most advanced container management system on the market today. Customers can deploy applications to Pivotal Cloud Foundry based on Docker images from public, secure registries such as Docker Hub.
MyPOV – Good move to provide better support for Docker, and the way how enterprises want to build, operate and consume Microservices – in a secure, repeatable and reliable way. Registry integration is the capability in demand and it is good to see Pivotal providing the capability.
Application Lifecycle Management Toolchain
Delivering on Pivotal’s vision of comprehensive Cloud Native application lifecycle management, the company is partnering with GitLab, CloudBees, and JFrog to deliver a turnkey continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) solution.
Building upon the popular software project management tool, Pivotal Tracker, customers can integrate platform-managed versions of GitLab source code repository, CloudBees Jenkins continuous integration, and JFrog Artifactory binary artifact management. By providing the building blocks of a modern application delivery toolchain, Pivotal Cloud Foundry empowers software organizations to build and deploy microservices and Cloud Native applications with confidence and speed.
MyPOV – It is good to see Pivotal acknowledging other popular development tools such as the ones mentioned and being integrated now with Pivotal Tracker. Next would be a roadmap / sharing of plans of other popular adjacent tools. For now congrats to the three who made it – GitLab, CloudBees and JFrog.
Early Access Support for Microsoft Azure
Pivotal Cloud Foundry extends its Cloud Native platform with early access support for Microsoft Azure, adding to the already-supported Amazon Web Services® (AWS), VMware vSphere®, VMware vCloud Air®, and OpenStack®. With Pivotal Cloud Foundry, customers can deploy and manage Cloud Native applications on almost any infrastructure; without the operational cost and complexity of maintaining their own underlying cloud infrastructure. [..]
MyPOV – Good to see Pivotal extending deployment options, as previously indicated – now adding support to Microsoft Azure. A good move for CloudFoundry users, who get more deployment options for their projects.
Overall MyPOV
Pivotal is making good progress with CloudFoundry, creating more value and synergies for customers and prospect. It further solidifies CloudFoundry‘s position as the leading enterprise PaaS. With Microsoft Azure support and access to .Net applications, Microsoft acknowledges the position of Cloud Foundry further, bringing core delivered Microsoft .Net assets to the CloudFoundry platform.On the concern side – with success comes also responsibility, Pivotal needs to deliver these capabilities, ensure customer success and become a reliable partner both for its growing ecosystem. There is no indication that Pivotal cannot deliver this, but the task ahead is not trivial. Starting to create, communicate and deliver to roadmaps will be the first steps.
But for now it’s good to be a Pivotal customer and prospect.
More on Pivotal
- News Analysis - Pivotal makes CloudFoundry more about multi-cloud - read here
- News Analysis - Pivotal pivots to OpenSource and Hortonworks - Or: OpenSource keeps winning - read here
More on Next Generation Applications::
- Progress Report - Cloudera is all in with Hadoop - now off to verticals - read here
- First Take - SAP Cloud for Planning - The next spreadsheet killer is off to a good start - read here
- Market Move - Oracle buys Datalogix - moves into DaaS - read here
- News Analysis - SAP commits to CloudFoundry and OpenStack - Key Steps - but what is the direction? Read here
- Event Report - MongoDB is a showcase for the power of Open Source in the enterprise - read here
- Musings - A manifesto: What are 'true' analytics? Read here
- Future of Work - One Spreadsheet at the time - Informatica Springbok - read here
- Musings - The Era of the no-design Database - Read here
- Mendix - the other path to build software - read here
- Musings - Time to ditch your datawarehouse .... - Read here