Cloud Foundry Diary for February, 2014

by Alex KhizhniakMarch 4, 2014
This February was, probably, one of the busiest months in the history of Cloud Foundry.

Literally, each day was filled with events, such as the announcement of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, open beta of Bluemix, the news about IBM’s $1B investment plans, etc.

1/02 ActiveState announced their new webinar, “How to Maximize Your Cloud Investment with a Private PaaS” (59:25 video).

2/02 Jim Northrop posted a guide on how to use the Gradle Cloud Foundry plug-in to push the Caelyf Sample Template to a Cloud Foundry platform other than Pivotal’s.

3/02 Pivotal held a meetup on BOSH at its office in San Francisco. The discussion was dedicated to cluster packaging for continuous integration and disaster recovery.

4/02 AppDynamic announced a partnership with Pivotal and posted a detailed tutorial on how to bring built-in app performance monitoring to Cloud Foundry.

5/02 Anynines presented their PaaS—based on Cloud Foundry—at CLOUDZONE Karlsruhe, Germany. At the same time, Andy Piper of Pivotal was promoting Cloud Foundry in Paris, learning French meanwhile.

6/02 Having launched their CloudPaaS offering (based on CF) last September, NephoScale confirmed they already “have customers that run Cloud Foundry.” The IaaS provider also mentioned it “partners with a few PaaS providers that leverage their API.”

7/02 The 1.0.2 version of the Cloud Foundry Java Client Library (cloudfoundry-client-lib) was released.

8/02–9/02 During this weekend, the CF community was watching the LEGO® Movie. =)

10/02 Pivotal overviewed top 17 big data things that had happened since O’Reilly Strata 2013, including the launch of their Pivotal One platform.

11/02 Altoros introduced a MS SQL Service Broker for Cloud Foundry v2. The new broker enables developing and deploying services using the Microsoft technology stack.

12/02 Dr. Nic Williams works on “bringing Docker to the BOSH-land.” More on playing with private Docker from him: here.

13/02 IBM Cloud organized a #cloudchat dedicated to the evolution of PaaS. The discussion gathered recognized industry analysts, as well as experts from ActiveState, Pivotal, IBM, Altoros, etc.

14/02 “451 Research” released a paper on ActiveState’s Stackato 3.0; while The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) revealed it is also using Cloud Foundry.

15/02 Overtimes on Saturdays: Matt Stine of Pivotal works on streaming logs into Splunk Enterprise via the Cloud Foundry loggregator.

16/02 Pivotal’s Sundays: looking for an office director in Chicago. The rest of us had the post-St. Valentine’s hangover. =)

17/02 Andy Piper published an explanatory blog post on debugging the Cloud Foundry runtime (or an app inside a Warden container) with BOSH-lite.

18/02 ActiveState were preparing for their webinar, “The Power of Buildpacks in a Platform as a Service” (watch the recorded video, 57:32).

19/02 AppFog cancelled its free plans to prevent malicious activities. On the same day, Verizon signed an agreement with CloudBees. This caused mixed reactions, since they had signed the Cloud Foundry community contributor license agreement (CCLA) on Nov 12, 2013.

20/02 RabbitMQ service became available on Pivotal CF.

21/02 Tensions heat up between the players behind OpenShift and Cloud Foundry: Red Hat kicked Piston out of RH Summit, then performed a $13,000 U-turn.

22/02 The new Cloud Foundry Health Manager (HM9000) written in Go was released.

23/02 IBM Pulse Open Summit started in Las Vegas; however, the most important announcements were made the next day.

24/02 Pivotal announced the Cloud Foundry Foundation backed by a number of industry leaders, such as HP, IBM, Rackspace, SAP, CenturyLink, etc. The company’s CEO, Paul Maritz, even created a Twitter account for that purpose. Read our detailed analysis on this topic to learn what it means for the community and what to expect next. Following this news, IBM launched open beta of the Bluemix PaaS and revealed that $1B would be invested in cloud initiatives.

25/02 Cloud Foundry for Eclipse 1.6.0 was released. In addition, version 6.0.1 of the official CLI for Cloud Foundry (written in Go) became available.

26/02 The Cloud Foundry Advisory Board held its February meeting. At the call, Iron Foundry joined the Cloud Foundry incubator; while ActiveState decided to open source the file-system service of their Stackato platform. Read the great recap from ActiveState on the summary of the CAB call and learn about other developer updates missed in our review. Another news on that day was brought by Pivotal: IronMQ message queueing and IronWorker task queue became available on Pivotal’s public PaaS.

27/02 The London Cloud Foundry Dev Community meetup took place in Shoreditch (feat. James Governor, Ban Hale, Jared Wray, and James Masson). A few hours later, Cloud Foundry Summit 2014 opened call for papers—the event will be held in San Francisco, June 9–11.

28/02 Altoros closed this month by introducing a basic overview of features and architectures implemented in Cloud Foundry and OpenShift—a chapter from a comparison study that may be published later this year.


Did we miss anything? Feel free to add other worthy news in the comments or tweet them mentioning @altoros.