The Cloud Foundry Foundation has adopted a pair of open source projects that further align Kubernetes with Cloud Foundry platforms. This is a big step for the foundation that has so far been somewhat slow in adopting aspects of the container orchestrator.

The projects are Eirini and CF Containerization. The former is now part of an incubation effort within the Cloud Foundry Project Management Committee (PMC). The latter is part of the Bosh PMC. The Cloud Foundry Foundation PMCs oversee platform engineering of the open source projects.

Eirini was originally proposed by IBM and has since seen contributions from SUSE and SAP. It allows operators and vendors to use Kubernetes as the underlying container scheduler for the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime. This would appear to run alongside Cloud Foundry’s Diego container management system.

IBM earlier this year announced an “experimental offering” that had the Cloud Foundry platform running on top of Kubernetes, which itself was running on IBM’s cloud architecture. The integration provided a level of abstraction for developers that work on containers but don’t want to deal with the intricacies inherent in the container orchestrator.

“We basically take care of all the Kubernetes stuff running underneath, and the Cloud Foundry people can just run on top of that and get those applications up and running,” Don Boulia, general manager for IBM’s Cloud Platform, told SDxCentral. “Cloud Foundry leverages the container concept but provides for a developer experience on top of that. It’s not just screwing around with Kubernetes but about building applications.”

CF Containerization was initially developed by SUSE. It packages Bosh into containers that are deployed into Kubernetes. This allows operators to deploy the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime into existing clusters.

SUSE earlier this year did something similar to CF Containerization as part of its Cloud Application Platform. That used most of the Cloud Foundry components, but it substituted Kubernetes instead of a Cloud Foundry product for deploying containers.

Bosh was originally developed by VMware to make it simpler to deploy a distributed system. Since then Google and Pivotal, a VMware sister company that curates a distribution of the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS), developed a new platform as an extension of Bosh that can be used to deploy Kubernetes.

That new platform was Kubo, which last year was renamed as Cloud Foundry Container Runtime (CFCR). It was also made the organization’s standard approach for deploying containers using Bosh and Kubernetes.

CFCR was the beachhead for Cloud Foundry into the Kubernetes ecosystem. Eirini and CF Containerization build on that approach.

“Developers have made it clear they need a simple, agile and flexible delivery method to push apps to production, which Cloud Foundry Application Runtime delivers,” explained Cloud Foundry Foundation CTO Chip Childers, in a statement. “They also have multiple use cases in which deployment and management of software packaged into containers is critical. These new projects demonstrate additional approaches to combining Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry technologies.”

Childers earlier this year indicated that the organization was working through gaining more confidence in the maturity and direction of Kubernetes and how it would fit into Cloud Foundry.

“We don’t chase the shiny ball,” Childers said, noting that the organization was more focused on only adding components that will help developers.