The Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF) launched a Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) to replace its Project Management Committee and promote greater transparency into its operations. 

The CFF TOC consists of VMware’s Eric Malm and David Stevenson; SAP’s Jan von Loewenstein and Stephan Merker; and Lee Porte of Gov.uk, who will serve as the TOC chairperson.

The TOC’s purpose is to oversee the direction and delivery of technical aspects of Cloud Foundry projects and support the ability of the user community to produce open-source work in a transparent and impartial way.

“The community's focus in making these changes is to improve the transparency, improve the openness, and frankly make the open-source community much more welcoming, accepting, and capable of supporting more casual contribution styles,” CFF Executive Director Chip Childers said at the recent Cloud Foundry Virtual Summit. “Which is really the way that we can innovate,” he added.

Only two major vendors are represented on the TOC, and in this context, Childers recognizes that “the new TOC has a lot of work to do.” The committee plans to incorporate more vendor diversity through changing how projects are organized. “[The TOC is] regrouping them together into much larger working groups with more diversity inside of them,” Childers said. 

Most of the organizational changes spurred by the creation of the TOC are happening in the lower levels of the CFF community. “We want to make sure that people who are not working full time have an equal ability to collaborate, to contribute, and to hold leadership roles,” Childers said.

CFF also announced the fifth version of its CF for Kubernetes platform, updated to include new operational capabilities for users. The newest version supports kpack v0.3.1 and Istio v1.9.5, and can be installed on Kubernetes clusters using v1.18 through v1.20. The first version of CF for Kubernetes, launched in April 2020, helped CFF progress its Kubernetes offering.

Childers did note that CF for Kubernetes isn’t necessarily pulling customers away from the group’s KubeCF open-source runtime project, which is still being commercialized along with CF for Kubernetes. “Generally, I wouldn’t say that KubeCF was a bridge [to CF for Kubernetes],” Childers said. “[KubeCF] still makes a lot of sense in the context where it’s being used, but we are starting to see active adoption of [CF for Kubernetes] in some large environments.” 

Small business and individual development team environments are adopting CF for Kubernetes more frequently, but those instances are harder to track. “Every time I turn a corner, I find another organization that's choosing to layer [CF for Kubernetes] on top of Kubernetes, and they're small, yet they're seeing some benefit from it,” Childers said. 

He predicts this trend will persist as vendors continue to commercialize CF on top of Kubernetes in diverse ways. “They're all [collaborating] very actively and openly in the community on bringing the platform forward,” Childers said.