PHILADELPHIA – The Cloud Foundry Foundation's Project Eirini platform was passing “core functional tests” as the organization looks to tighten its embrace of Kubernetes as a platform option. The move comes just a few months after Cloud Foundry adopted Eirini as an incubation project and could indicate plans to phase out its Diego container management platform.

Abby Kearns, executive director of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, told attendees during a keynote address at this week’s Cloud Foundry North America Summit in Philadelphia, that Eirini had passed core functional tests “and is now mature enough that early adopters have begun to deploy in production environments.”

Some of those early adopters Kearns mentioned include IBM, which originally developed the platform and this week added support into the latest release of its Cloud Foundry Enterprise Environment. Cloud Foundry Foundation CTO Chip Childers, during a separate keynote, added that other vendors are also moving with early support, including SUSE. The project has also attracted steady development work from Pivotal, SAP, and Google, which was also behind the initial Kubernetes release.

“These are projects that are going to power us into the future,” Kearns added.

The Cloud Foundry Foundation last October officially adopted Eirini as an incubation project within the Cloud Foundry Project Management Committee (PMC). Ongoing Eirini work is focused on production readiness and testing against hosted managed Kubernetes environments from public cloud providers.

Eirini also provides an option for developers to run alongside or in place of Cloud Foundry’s Diego container management system. This is similar to how Kubernetes basically replaced distro-specific container orchestration systems like Docker Swarm and Apache Mesos.

“A lot of work needs to be done for that but it’s evolving quickly,” Childers said of interoperability tests using Eirini as a bridge between Diego and Kubernetes. He did add that the evolution from Diego to Eirini, if it does occur, will be similar to how Cloud Foundry moved from its DEA architecture system to its Diego architecture system. That involved Diego having to show functional parity to DEA and the necessary production readiness for vendors and organizations to feel comfortable using Diego in place of DEA.

IBM’s Julian Friedman, who is project lead for Eirini at the Cloud Foundry Foundation, explained that the platform provides developers with a “cf push” experience for moving applications into production on top of Kubernetes. “Instead of mapping to Diego we are mapping to Kubernetes,” Friedman said. In practice, this means that Eirini automates some of the YAML coding process that is typically needed for Kubernetes.

The Eirini work also moves Cloud Foundry closer to the “shiny ball” that is Kubernetes. From a practical perspective, Cloud Foundry is a higher level abstraction for developers. However, this week’s Cloud Foundry event has been heavy on discussions and demonstrations of tying Cloud Foundry closer to Kubernetes. For Cloud Foundry, that preferred method is Eirini.

Childers at last year’s Cloud Foundry Foundation Summit 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. It appears that Cloud Foundry is gaining that necessary confidence.

Photo: Cloud Foundry Foundation CTO Chip Childers.