I’ve been on the outskirts of the CloudFoundry (CF) universe from the dawn of the project (it’s a little remembered fact that there was a 2011 Crowbar install of CloudFoundry.

Progress and investment have been substantial and, happily, organic. Like many platforms, it’s success relies on a reasonable balance between strong opinions about “right” patterns and enough flexibility to accommodate exceptions.

From a well patterned foundation, development teams find acceleration.  This seems to be helping CloudFoundry win some high-profile enterprise adopters.

The interesting challenge ahead of the project comes from building more complex autonomous deployments. With the challenge of horizontal scale of arguably behind them, CF users are starting to build more complex architectures.  This includes dynamic provisioning of the providers (like data bases, object stores and other persistent adjacent services) and connecting to containerized “micro-services.”  (see Matt Stine’s preso)

While this is a natural evolution, it adds an order of magnitude more complexity because the contracts between previously isolated layers are suddenly not reliable.

For example, what happens to a CF deployment when the database provider is field upgraded to a new version.  That could introduce breaking changes in dependent applications that are completely opaque to the data provider.  These are hard problems to solve.

Happily, that’s exactly the discussions that we’re starting to have with container orchestration systems.  It’s also part of the dialog that I’ve been trying to drive with Functional Operations (FuncOps Preso) on the physical automation side.  I’m optimistic that CloudFoundry patterns will help make this problem more tractable.