Something old, something new, something containery… Pivotal Cloud Foundry 2.3 is here

Something old, something new, something containery… Pivotal Cloud Foundry 2.3 is here

Pivotal has updated its distribution of cloud application platform Cloud Foundry to v2.3, throwing in new versions of the Pivotal Container Service (PKS), Spring Cloud Services for PCF, and Steeltoe.

Beta testers might already be familiar with some of the new additions. Among them is Service Instance Sharing, which offers teams ways to get access to others’ backing service instances, while taking the roles of the requesting member and isolation of responsibilities into account. To make sure platform credentials aren’t leaked, the service can be combined with the CredHub Service Broker.

For better monitoring, PCF Healthwatch now offers Alerting History Details. A new extensible user interface should assist admins in understanding the platform’s state.

Developers will find a feature to stream metrics in real time in the PCF Metrics component, which can be enabled by a play button, ocated in the upper right corner, next to the timeline. In the Application Developer Controls pane of a PAS tile, users can now set a custom internal domain, so they don’t have to go with the default apps.internal anymore.

Container with a K

PKS 1.2 is now available as part of the platform offering. Among its new features are fresh out of beta multi-master capabilities across availability zones and support for cloud computing service AWS – before, users could only choose between GCP and vSphere. PKS includes Kubernetes 1.11 to keep up with the container orchestrator project’s release cycle.

Speaking of Kubernetes, users can now configure the destination for their K8s cluster events, node system logs, stdout and stderr from the pods, using PKS CRD as a sort of sink. PKS also synchronises the permissions granted to a user via Kubernetes’ resource-based access control with users and groups in LDAP-based directories.

Moreover, the container service received some performance improvements, such as faster, parallelized node creation on cluster creation, and enhanced security and credential handling. A more detailed list can be found in an introductory blog entry.

Don’t reinvent but integrate

Steeltoe 2.1 has been out for a couple of days already, but is also part of the platform release. The open source project contains client libraries to build cloud-native microservice applications with .NET Core, and .NET Frameworks like ASP.NET. Part of the enhancements that can be found in the new version are distributed tracing, additional management endpoints and health contributors, as well as ways to collect application metrics.

Spring Cloud Service for PCF just had its second major release and includes support for Spring Boot 2 apps amongst other things. Operators can now also set custom domains for service instances. More updates can be found in components such as Spring Cloud Data Flow (SCDF) for PCF 1.2 which is the PCF version of the SCDF 1.6 that was finished last spring and included dashboard, Kubernetes support and deployment property parsing improvements, as well as an app hosting tool.

More information can be found on the Pivotal blog. The platform is free for trial.