Is anyone working on a CF CRD & Controller?


Daniel Jones
 

Hi all,

In the spirit of community, I'm going to ask this question outright and in the open - is anyone (*looks at VMware MAPBU*) working on a CRD and accompanying controller for CF on Kubernetes?

Anyone with a non-trivial amount of Cloud Foundry experience knows that whilst the imperative interface of the CF CLI is great for exploratory work, it's far from ideal for production environments. I make a point of telling folks in CF training courses that no human should be using the CLI in production, other than for debugging.

A declarative interface for CF has always been desirable, and its omission is going to become even more stark once running CF on Kubernetes is the norm. We've had cf-mgmt which is close, but involves more steps than is ideal.

It'd be great to have one or more CRDs that represent the state of a Cloud Foundry, and accompanying controllers that converge upon that state. When I talk about state, I mean things like orgs, spaces, service broker registrations, service instances, roles and so on.

Four years ago I started work on a project called cf-converger to diff and converge a Cloud Foundry instance on a state declared in YAML. I got distracted with running a business and doing billable work, so whilst the concept was proven, it never really got to a state of usefulness. Plus, I seemed to spend half my coding time just writing excessively-verbose chained method calls on the official Java CF client :D 

I see such a solution as an inevitability in the Kubernetes-based future. Whilst I'm personally tempted to resurrect the project, it makes very little sense for a company like EngineerBetter to divert resources from billable work to a project that is needed, but can't be monetised.

Are any of the big players working on something similar? Is it something we should all be thinking and talking about? Is there any point in the community working on such a solution, or are one of the bigger companies secretly working on something that would supersede any community effort?

Regards,
Daniel 'Deejay' Jones - CEO
+44 (0)79 8000 9153
EngineerBetter Ltd - More than cloud platform specialists

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