This post is about the forthcoming talk “Cloud Foundry for Everyone” being given by Matthias Haeussler and Mirna Alaisami at Cloud Foundry NA Summit on Wednesday, June 24th in the Developer Experience track. Register for Summit here.
The idea for this conference talk originates from a student lecture about “Cloud Native Software Development” I was teaching two years ago at University of Applied Sciences in Stuttgart. I hired two students for a project on which I knew they had basic knowledge about distributed systems and microservice development, but no experience with Cloud Foundry whatsoever. So I left them with two questions without further instruction:
- What is Cloud Foundry?
- How can you access it?
I wanted to figure out how easy or difficult it is for a complete beginner to get started with the technology and how long would it take somebody to get their first hands-on experience. So it evolved into the question of which basic principles of Cloud Foundry do you need to understand and what are your different free-tier options and how do they compare.
This talk will summarize the various steps the students walked through and discovered:
- Basic Cloud Foundry commands & components (“what is ‘cf push’”)
- Apps, buildpacks, services, marketplace as abstractions on Kubernetes
- Where to get information, help and tutorials
- Types of Cloud Foundry installation (CF Dev, cloud-based, on-premise)
- Comparison of free offerings by major providers
- Live demo
In the meantime a lot of progress has been made and there are new options to get started and to play with Cloud Foundry. The following options will be shown in the presentation at the virtual Summit:
Try Cloud Foundry
A guided walk-through to pick a cloud-provider and first steps tutorial, which includes many of the aspects described in the list before.
Cloud Foundry on Katacoda
This is probably the newest and fastest way to get your first hands-on Cloud Foundry experience. In addition to our talk there will be afternoon hands-on sessions done by Steve Greenberg using this technology.
Kubernetes-based Cloud Foundry options
Major development has happened around the Kubernetes-based Cloud Foundry options with projects like KubeCF or cf-for-k8s. This enables people to easily spin up a Cloud Foundry environment on top of an existing Kubernetes cluster. Members of the community have written blog posts and tutorials on how to get there in simple steps, which we will highlight in the talk.
To sum things up, this talk will give you all required information to get started quickly with your own Cloud Foundry experience and hopefully inspire you to do so right away. We hope you attend!
