It's important that this community understands that the *inclusion* of BOSH in the 2017 certification would *exclude* the Stackato and ContainerCF distributions which were certified in 2016, possibly others. This draft moves the goalposts significantly.
Quoting Chip:
It's about consistency across the distributions. Requiring BOSH as the
deployment method gives us two key things: (1) much more consistency for
operators of the platform and (2) a consistent target (really a least common
denominator) for ISV's packaging software for backing services. The value of
consistency year over year doesn't diminish the value of experimentation
outside of the certified distributions.
What about a consistent target for Cloud Foundry certified distributions? I completely disagree that this does not diminish experimentation. Companies will not invest in experiments that can never be commercially leveraged, and cannot make financial commitments without "consistency year over year" in the certification process itself.
To provide a little of my perspective: HPE's Stackato team embarked on a huge effort to re-engineer our product to meet the 2016 Cloud Foundry certification standard. This involved deprecating a lot of code and starting basically from scratch to develop Stakato 4.
We made this investment and took these risks with the understanding that the benefits of certification (customer confidence, compatibility, developers better positioned to contribute upstream, less churn maintaining forked code) would outweigh the hardships. If the BOSH requirement makes it into the 2017 certification we're actually worse off than we were a year ago, with less confidence that the requirements won't shift under our feet again.
I'm not actually objecting to BOSH itself here, just the notion that adding it to Cloud Foundry certification requirements is necessary. BOSH was built to be a comprehensive release engineering tool for *any* project. Let it be it's own thing.
TT
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Troy Topnik
Sr. Product Manager | Helion Stackato
troy.topnik(a)hpe.com
