IBM’s New Cloud Foundry Ship in your Data Center Ocean — Cloud Foundry Enterprise Environment
IBM’s 3.2.0 release of IBM Cloud Private includes the general availability of Cloud Foundry Enterprise Environment. This release rounds out the offering, providing a complete Cloud Foundry solution. Cloud Foundry Enterprise Environment includes integrated monitoring and alerting, local Kubernetes service catalog via the Cloud Foundry marketplace, scaling worker nodes, and an in-place upgrade process for new releases and fix packs.
Full stack currency
The full stack version of IBM Cloud Private Cloud Foundry also received currency updates, bringing its release level to 7.5. This update uses cflinuxfs3 as the default stack for applications moving forward. The console also received an update that addresses security and new features (Public GitLab support, CF App using docker image, etc…). The latest IBM versions of Liberty, Swift, NodeJS, and dotNET are provided.
Installation enhancements
The installer that is used for the full stack and Kubernetes deployments has also been enhanced. The deployment console has been internationalized, supporting several different languages. The entire communication flow has been given TLS1.2 treatment, making sure external and loopback communication is done via secure protocols.
Cloud Foundry Enterprise Environment
As part of completing the Cloud Foundry Enterprise Environment platform, monitoring for Cloud Foundry is configured automatically on the hosting IBM Cloud Private Kubernetes infrastructure, and five Grafana dashboards are automatically loaded. The Kubernetes Helm services broker is also configured for the Cloud Foundry marketplace. This update makes the Kubernetes Helm catalog available (under access control) to Cloud Foundry applications, as part of the standard installation process.
The enterprise environment installation now leverages taints and tolerations, so that Diego cell containers and the management plane can be divided onto specific worker nodes. There is also LDAP integration so that you can use enterprise authentication. The installer is now able to scale the system, allowing the platform to grow over time to meet your enterprise application needs.
IBM buildpacks are included as part of the general availability of Cloud Foundry Enterprise Environment, completing the Kubernetes application language support which is equal to the other offerings.
Cloud Foundry Enterprise Environment general availability moves the Cloud Foundry platform forward, tightly coupling Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes offerings in an easy to use solution. This is the first part of the journey toward native Kubernetes-based Cloud Foundry application containers, but represents a milestone in the transformation of the offering.
Special thanks to @Lindsay Martin for keeping my writing on the straight and narrow.
