Every once in a while, you will face a conundrum: why use x technology when you already have y? It’s easy to mistake different technologies as competing with each other instead of thinking of them as complementing each other. Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes fall into this category.
There is significant overlap between what Cloud Foundry does and what Kubernetes can do. Sanjay Patil, SAP’s chief product expert, shared a high level perspective on why the company uses the two in tandem.
He provided an overview of Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry to explain the advantages and scope of both. Cloud Foundry-based applications allow developer to focuses on business logic, while the platform takes care of looking into the code and the dependencies, creating a droplet, spinning off instances of the processes, doing service binding and managing all the hard work.
Cloud Foundry provides extreme ease of use and removes any unnecessary burden for developers so that health management, scaling, resiliency, etc. are taken care of by the platform. Kubernetes offers flexibility and control to developers, enabling them to fine-tune things; however, it requires a bit more work.
The bottom line is, according to Patil, that you can benefit from using both. In a multi-cloud environment, you can use a Kubernetes cluster as a service and run Cloud Foundry itself as a workload on these clusters. As a result, you can have apps created by Cloud Foundry also running on Kubernetes and consuming the same services.
But this doesn’t mean developers are forced to solve the same problems twice – once on Cloud Foundry and then on Kubernetes. Patil talked about the projects started by SAP, SUSE and IBM that address these problems.
Check out Patil’s detailed comparison of Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes, how they complement each other, and how SAP is using both to solve problems for its customers.
