Software and services company Pivotal Software Inc., a subsidiary of Dell Technologies Inc., today announced a major update to its Cloud Foundry product during its annual SpringOne Platform conference.

The update adds new serverless computing capabilities to the popular developer platform, and it also integrates Pivotal’s new container service, announced during VMworld 2017 in August. Pivotal Software is the company that leads the development of Cloud Foundry, which is an open-source cloud platform-as-a-service offering used by developers to build, deploy and run cloud-native software applications.

The platform, first developed by VMware Inc. allows developers to code in multiple languages and frameworks. Then they can deploy their applications on on-premises infrastructure, public and private clouds such as Amazon Web Services or OpenStack. They also can be deployed on Cloud Foundry-certified platforms, including IBM Bluemix Cloud Foundry, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, SAP Cloud Platform, Huawei FusionStage and Swisscom Application Cloud.

With Cloud Foundry, Pivotal’s main aim is to help Fortune 500 companies transform their mission-critical legacy applications into so-called “cloud native” apps that can run on any platform. The idea is to help these monolithic companies become as agile as well-known startups such as Uber Technologies Inc. and Internet giants such as Google LLC.

With that in mind Pivotal introduced the new Pivotal Container Service during VMworld. At the time it said the offering was designed to help companies take advantage of software containers, which are rapidly becoming the standard design platform for developers thanks to their ability to abstract applications away from the underlying hardware, allowing them to run on any platform. The Pivotal Container Service is said to be a commercial version of Kubo, an open-source project developed by Google and Pivotal that provides the ability to create containers quickly and easily instead of having to provision physical servers for them in a data center.

Now, PKS is being integrated with Cloud Foundry, enabling developers to deploy the popular Kubernetes container orchestration service so they can easily manage containerized apps built on the platform.

Along with containers, Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry is getting new serverless compute capabilities, enabling users to run new kinds of event-driven services and applications, such as single-purpose apps that are triggered by specific events. What this means is that developers can use Pivotal’s serverless product to trigger activity based on data sent by users or messaging systems such as RabbitMQ or Apache Kafka. For example, a large bank can send a notification to a customer whose mobile banking app is detected in another country, asking whether the customer wants to activate the use of a credit card in that location.

Pivotal also said it’s upgrading its Pivotal Application Service runtime with support for Windows Server 2016 containers built on Microsoft Corp.’s .NET framework. In addition, the company has added a new “Healthwatch” feature to the service, an operational dashboard that can monitor data on the platform’s performance to ensure everything runs smoothly and help prevent problems that could cause systems to crash.

Pivotal Software will showcase the updated CloudFoundry during its SpringOne Platform conference on Wednesday ahead of its general availability next year.

Image: Pivotal Software