Cloud Foundry gets an updated CLI to make life easier for enterprise developers

The Cloud Foundry Foundation, the nonprofit behind the popular open-source enterprise platform-as-a-service project, is holding its developer conference today. What’s usually a bi-annual community gathering (traditionally one in Europe and one in North America) is now a virtual event, but there’s still plenty of news from the Summit, both from the organization itself and from the wider ecosystem.

After going through a number of challenging technical changes in order to adapt to the new world of containers and DevOps, the organization’s focus these days is squarely on improving the developer experience around Cloud Foundry (CF). The promise of CF, after all, has always been that it would make life easier for enterprise developers (assuming they follow the overall CF processes).

“There are really two areas of focus that our community has: number one, re-platform on Kubernetes. No major announcements about that. […] And then the secondary focus is continuing to evolve our developer experience,” Chip Childers, the executive director of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, told me ahead of today’s announcements.

At the core of the CF experience is its “cf” command-line interface(CLI). With today’s update, this is getting a number of new capabilities, mostly with an eye to giving developers more flexibility to support their own workflows.

“The cf CLI v7 was made possible through the tremendous work of a diverse, distributed group of collaborators and committers,” said Josh Collins, Cloud Foundry’s CLI project lead and senior product manager at VMware. “Modern development techniques are much simpler with Cloud Foundry as a result of the new CLI, which abstracts away the nuances of the CF API into a command-line interface that’s easy and elegant to use.”

Built on top of CF’s v3 APIs, which have been in the making for a while, the new CLI enables features like rolling app deployments for example, to allow developers to push updates without downtime. “Let’s say you have a number of instances of the application out there and you want to slowly roll instance by instance to perform the upgrade and allow traffic to be spread across both new and old versions,” explained Childers. “Being able to do that with just a simple command is a very powerful thing.”

Developers can also now run sub-steps of their “cf -push” processes. With this, they get more granular control over their deployments (“cf -push” is the command for deploying a CF application) and they now get the ability to push apps that run multiple processes, maybe for a UI process and a worker process.

In the overall Cloud Foundry ecosystem, things continue at their regular pace, with EngineerBetter, for example, joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation as a new member, Suse updating its Cloud Application Platform and long-time CF backers like anynines, Atos and Grape Up updating their respective CF-centric platforms, too. Stark & Wayne, which has long offered a managed CF solution, too, is launching new support options with the addition of college-style advisory sessions and an update to its Kubernetes-centric Gluon controller for CF deployments.