The Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF) bolstered its container management platform with an updated product that will become its default approach for deployments. That updated product will also go by a new name.

CFF’s Kubo project will now be known as the Cloud Foundry Container Runtime (CFCR), and become the standard CFF approach for deploying containers using Bosh and Kubernetes. Bosh will continue as the base infrastructure for provisioning runtime.

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 Kubo as an extension of Bosh that can be used to deploy Kubernetes.

VMware and Pivotal in August announced Pivotal Container Service (PKS) as the commercial version of Kubo. PKS, was developed with the help of Google and will allow customers to deploy and manage Kubernetes on-premises.

The CFF move will also see CFCR garner default support for Istio, as well as persistence of Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Vsphere. Istio is a collaboration between Google, Lyft, and IBM targeted at open source management of microservices.

CFCR can also be used to deploy Application Runtime, which was previously known as Elastic Runtime, for a Cloud Application Platform. Application Runtime is an app-centric platform designed to support application development lifecycle.

Similar to CFCR, Application Runtime is based on Bosh. Both platforms include an Open Service Broker application programming interface (API) designed to ease application integration.

Analysts noted the moves target continued difficulties for enterprises in looking to take advantage of container technology, and more specifically for the use of Kubernetes.

"The initial setup and operations of Kubernetes can be challenging,” said Fintan Ryan, a RedMonk analyst, in a statement. “[CFCR] gives developers and operators a simple method to create a highly available Kubernetes environment with Bosh and avoid many of the pitfalls users initially encounter.”

The Cloud Foundry Foundation last month released a survey that showed the percentage of respondents using containers at their company had increased from 22 percent in 2016, to 25 percent this year. Those evaluating use of containers increased from 31 percent to 42 percent.

However, when compared to a similar survey conducted by Evans Data earlier this year, the Cloud Foundry Foundation report indicated slower-than-expected adoption of containers over the past year.

“There has been no dramatic increase in broad deployment of containers by companies over the past year,” the CFF report noted. “We see a significant increase in interest among Cloud Foundry Foundation survey participants (Evans does not), but actual adoption and deployment has seen either marginal growth or even a significant drop, based on Evans data.”

In a recent survey conducted by SDxCentral, 55 percent of respondents that are not currently using container technology said a “lack of maturity” was the main reason for their reluctance. Twenty-seven percent noted a “lack of management and deployment tools” was holding them back, while 24 percent said they “don’t know how to scale containers yet.”