The Cloud Foundry Foundation today said it’s adopting a pair of open-source projects to help integrate the Kubernetes container orchestrator with its namesake application development platform.

The foundation is the governing body that leads the development of Cloud Foundry, which is a cloud platform as a service used by developers to build, deploy, run and scale modern applications.

The platform is often used for the continuous delivery of updates to apps, since it supports the full development lifecycle from the initial build to testing to deployment. Another key advantage of Cloud Foundry is its software container-based architecture, which means apps can be built in any programming language and run on a variety of public clouds or on-premises infrastructures without any changes being made to their codebase.

Strangely, although Cloud Foundry is used to build container-based apps, the platform has been slow to align itself with Kubernetes, which is the most popular software used to orchestrate large clusters of containers. The foundation is apparently trying to make up for this with its two new projects, called Eirini and CF Containerization.

The Eirini project is being developed by companies that include IBM Corp. SUSE and SAP SE. Its main purpose is to make it easier to use Kubernetes as the underlying container scheduler for the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime, which is used to run the application platform and their container-based applications in parallel.

As for CF Containerization, this is used to package BOSH into containers that are deployed within Kubernetes. BOSH is a popular Cloud Foundry tool first developed by VMware Inc. that’s used for building, deploying and managing cloud applications.

The new projects underscore how Kubernetes has emerged as the orchestration tool of choice for the vast majority of container developers, said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc.

“CxOs want partnerships with the leading platforms and tools and that’s the case here with CF Containerization, packaging CF Bosh-based assets into Kubernetes,” Mueller said. “Eirini allows Kubernetes to be the scheduler for the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime. Fewer moving parts and interoperability for reuse is exactly what enterprises building next-generation applications with containers want and need.”

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