Dear Cloud Foundry Community,

Over the last year, we have seen the industry shift towards deploying software on top of Kubernetes. As a result, we have all chosen to invest heavily in building on top of Kubernetes. Separately, we have also observed that BOSH has reached a point of stability and maturity, such that there aren’t lots of incoming feature requests and enhancements to add.

We continue to view BOSH as an important project and are still fully committed to supporting our OSS users using BOSH for the next couple years . However, in light of these changes, several BOSH PMC projects[1] will be shifting from the pairing model to the distributed committer model (for more information about distributed committer vs pairing models, see the CFF Development Operations Policy [2], section IV.B.). Shatarupa Nandi (snandi@..., @rupa on CFF Slack) and Nadja Conklin (nconklin@..., @Nadja Conklin on CFF Slack) will temporarily step in as Project Leads. 

We are moving away from having a full time team working on each of the projects. Instead, we will have 6-8 engineers who will dedicate a portion of their time on a regular basis for ongoing support and maintenance of the BOSH projects. This will likely result in the following changes:

• A reduced cadence of cutting new stemcells and patching existing stemcells for low and medium severity CVEs. Presently, we aim to cut new stemcell patches every 2 weeks. We will now be doing the same every 6 weeks. We will maintain the status quo for high and critical CVEs and will patch those as soon as possible.

• We will pause working on Bionic stemcells and will not be cutting a new line of Bionic stemcells. We are aware that Xenial stemcells are supported until April 2021. This is an area where we are seeking help from the CFF community. Please see the end of the email. We may pick up this work during the 2nd half of the year, depending on cf-for-k8s adoption and our level of staffing on BOSH.

• A reduced cadence of new releases of BOSH PMC projects[1]. Since there will be little active development, we will move to cutting releases ad-hoc when there are enough changes built up.

• We will pause active development on the various CPIs (including OpenStack CPI, Azure CPI, GCP CPI, and AWS CPI.) We will continue to patch critical bugs, backwards incompatible IaaS API changes, and high severity CVEs. However, we will not be adding features to extend the capabilities of the CPIs.

• While we will continue to answer questions about BOSH, we will likely be less responsive than before. We still hope to answer questions on these Slack channels within a reasonable time. We will be most active in #bosh. Other BOSH Slack channels (for example, #bosh-core-dev) will see reduced activity and will be deprecated over time.

• The committers are all on cf-bosh@..., and will continue to engage with the community of users and contributors via the mailing lists. 

We would like to seek help from other members of the Cloud Foundry community to help with ongoing maintenance of the BOSH projects. Here are some ways in which you can help us:

• Please help your friends in the community by answering questions on #bosh

• If you would like to contribute to adding Bionic support and/or start publishing Bionic stemcells on bosh.io, we would welcome PRs and will be happy to work with you to review and merge them. If you are interested in forming an OSS team to build Bionic stemcells and add support for Bionic to Cloud Foundry components, please reach out to Marco Voelz or Shatarupa Nandi.

• If you would like improvements in BOSH and/or the CPIs, please consider contributing the feature directly via PRs to the various repos

• If you notice a buildup of features / fixes that warrant a release being cut, ping the team via cf-bosh@...

• If you would like to be a Project Lead for any of these projects, please reach out to Shatarupa Nandi and/or Nadja Conklin.

Thank you for your help and support!

[1] This includes the following repos: bosh, bosh-agent, bosh-dns-release, bosh-linux-stemcell-builder, bosh-deployment, bosh-cli, bbl, bosh.io github org, docs-bosh, bpm-release, bosh-google-cpi-release, bosh-azure-cpi-release, bosh-openstack-cpi-release, bosh-aws-cpi-release, bosh-lite, bosh-utils, bosh-s3cli, bosh-acceptance-tests, jumpbox-deployment, os-conf-release.

To our community and members,

We recognize the global emergency caused by COVID-19 is impacting all of us. Our thoughts are with our community, members, friends, and colleagues as we approach this new challenge together. 

As many parts of the world are implementing social distancing and, in many cases, urging or even requiring citizens to stay at home, many of us are privileged to be able to work from home. Some of our project teams have significant experience working and pairing remotely. For those of you that are new to working from home, please reach out to the larger community for support and or best practices. If you have experience working remotely, we encourage you to share your best practices with others -- both in the community and more broadly (in the form of blog posts, podcasts, tweets). Now is the time for our community to show its support for each other in any way possible.

As we near our June 25th Cloud Foundry Summit North America, please know that we are actively monitoring the situation as it evolves and will be adjusting plans as necessary to ensure the safety and health of our community. As of today, we remain hopeful we will have the opportunity to come together in person. On Friday, we updated the event’s novel coronavirus update page. We will keep you updated on any future changes to the event plans, and remind everyone to continue to check for updates on that page. 

It is important to remember that each of us will experience the impact of this outbreak in different ways. Our community is a global network of individuals who genuinely care about each other. In this time of uncertainty, let us demonstrate that kindness to each other by remaining flexible and supportive - in the Cloud Foundry community and in your local community. Help where you can. Be patient, be safe, and remember to take care of yourself. We will all get through this together.

In the meantime, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us, at the Foundation, if there is anything we can do to better support you during this time.