Businesses live in a multi-cloud world. There is no one cloud for all occasions. Therefore, any cloud solution must work across these clouds. That takes common standards. The Cloud Foundry Foundation is a leading provider of software that meets those standards. They plan to keep that lead by making their products unique in the market.

“We’re really happy with the number of large enterprises that are here to share their story,” said Chip Childers (pictured), chief technology officer of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, during the Cloud Foundry Summit event in Santa Clara, California.

Childers spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and John Troyer (@jtroyer), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio. He discussed the Foundation’s goals, surrounding community and cloud technology.

Building a community around open-source

The Cloud Foundry Foundation sees its goals in a certain light. First, it is a steward of the software that its vendors distribute, but it also has a role in the ecosystem, Childers explained. The Foundation focuses on supporting the users and customers of its open-source software. Then, it wants to maintain a robust market ecosystem around the project, he added.

This goes toward the philosophy of the Foundation community. Right now, billions of dollars rely on this platform, according to Childers. Because of that, the upstream community spends a lot of time being deliberate about their technical decisions. This allows the Foundation to release a complete platform, which can then be updated quickly.

“So many people rely on [the platform’s] quality that we’re very thoughtful about when is the right time to build our own and when should we adopt and embrace and continue to support another open-source project,” Childers said.

As an example, the Foundation has recently added support for container-to-container networking. This creates a policy framework to describe how different applications across the network talk to each other, Childers explained. The update gives the Foundation access to all the interesting work going on concerning software-defined networking and overlay networking.

Common frameworks and software are especially important in the multi-cloud world. Cloud providers tend to offer services around infrastructure building or high-level analytics and databases. The Cloud Foundry platform serves as a way to make use of those common capabilities, according to Childers. It also allows users to integrate other services with those from their cloud vendor.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of the Cloud Foundry Summit.

Photo: SiliconANGLE