Suse launches version 2.0 of its Cloud Foundry-based Cloud Application Platform

Suse, the well-known German open-source company that went through more corporate owners than anybody can remember until it finally became independent again in 2019, has long been a champion of Cloud Foundry, the open-source platform-as-a-service project. And while you may think of Suse as a Linux distribution, today’s company also offers a number of other services, including a container platform, DevOps tools and the Suse Cloud Application Platform, based on Cloud Foundry. Today, right in time for the bi-annual (and now virtual) Cloud Foundry Summit, the company announced the launch of version 2.0 of this platform.

The promise of the Application Platform, and indeed Cloud Foundry, is that it allows for one-step application deployments and an enterprise-ready platform to host them.

The marquee feature of version 2.0 is that it now includes a new Kubernetes Operator, a standard way of packaging, deploying and managing container-based applications, which makes deploying and managing Cloud Foundry on Kubernetes infrastructure easier.

Suse President of Engineering and Innovation Thomas Di Giacomo also notes that it’s now easier to “install, operate and maintain on Kubernetes platforms anywhere — on premises and in public clouds,” and that it opens up a new path for existing Cloud Foundry users to move to a modern container-based architecture. Indeed, for the last few years, Suse has been crucial to bringing both Kubernetes support to Cloud Foundry and Cloud Foundry to Kubernetes.

Cloud Foundry, it’s worth noting, long used its home-grown container orchestration tool, which the community developed before anybody had even heard of Kubernetes. Over the course of the last few years, though, Kubernetes became the de facto standard for container management, and today, Cloud Foundry supports both its own Diego tool and Kubernetes.

“Suse Cloud Application Platform 2.0 builds on and advances those efforts, incorporating several upstream technologies recently contributed by Suse to the Cloud Foundry Community,” writes Di Giacomo. “These include KubeCF, a containerized version of the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime designed to run on Kubernetes, and Project Quarks, a Kubernetes operator for automating deployment and management of Cloud Foundry on Kubernetes.”