At the recent Cloud Foundry Summit, Microsoft announced they have joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation as a Gold member. In addition to joining the foundation, Microsoft is also extending its support for the open source cloud platform by including back-end integration with Azure Database (PostgreSQL and MySQL) and cloud broker support for SQL Database, Service Bus, and Cosmos DB. Microsoft is also including Cloud Foundry command line interface (CLI) tooling in the Cloud Shell for easy Cloud Foundry management.
Cloud Foundry is an open source platform that provides a layer of abstraction between private and public cloud offerings and applications that run-on top of that infrastructure. Using Cloud Foundry, customers can reduce vendor/cloud lock-in and build on top of a common runtime and middleware services.
Microsoft continues to make investments in open source technology having recently joined the Linux Foundation. Corey Sanders, director of compute at Microsoft, describes some of the reasons why Microsoft has decided to join the Cloud Foundry Foundation:
We have built new open-source technologies and have made numerous community contributions. Making Azure an open, flexible, and portable platform takes a lot of friends. The partnership with the Cloud Foundry Foundation extends our commitment to deeply collaborate and innovate in the open community. We remain committed to create a diverse and open technology ecosystem, to offer you the freedom to deploy the application solution you want on the cloud platform you prefer.
A benefit for existing Microsoft customers who are interested in leveraging Cloud Foundry, but may already be using some of Microsoft’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) technologies is the addition of Cloud Foundry integration for Azure services. Some of this integration includes Azure Service Bus for publish/subscribe messaging, as an alternative to RabbitMQ and Azure SQL Database, or Cosmos DB, as an alternative to MySQL or PostgreSQL. These additional Microsoft PaaS offerings are now enabled in Cloud Foundry because of investments in Meta Azure Service Broker.
Integrating cloud native platforms with application platforms like Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes is very important to Microsoft in order for customers to participate in multi-cloud and multi-platform architectures. As a result, Microsoft has been working closely with the Open Service Borker API ecosystem. Sanders explains why Microsoft has decided to join the Open Service Broker working group:
The Azure team has been deeply involved in enabling the Open Service Broker API ecosystem in Kubernetes and making it easier for developers to use Azure services through the Service Catalog as part of an effort that started with Deis. This broker strives to enable a standard interface for connecting cloud native platforms with application platforms like Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes. Working with this group, I hope we can accelerate the efforts to standardize the interface for connecting cloud native platforms.
Other integration with the Cloud Foundry platform that Microsoft is providing includes:
- Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) plugin provides rich support for teams building continuous integration/continuous delivery pipelines for Cloud Foundry including the ability to deploy a Cloud Foundry environment from a VSTS build agent.
- Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS) Log Analytics, which allows customers to collect system and application metrics from their Cloud Foundry Application and publish this telemetry to OMS.
While some may wonder what is in it for Microsoft to be part of this foundation, Sanders cites that:
Many of the largest enterprises have chosen Cloud Foundry to help solve complex business challenges and have looked to Azure as the leading enterprise cloud. Some Microsoft customers currently running Cloud Foundry on Azure include Ford, Manulife and Merrill. We want Azure to be the best place for deploying portable and open Cloud Foundry applications without any lock-in.
