Cloud Foundry Rising as Runtime for App Portability

More than half of large enterprises that have implemented Cloud Foundry as their application runtime, orchestration and DevOps environment for business modernization projects are using it across multiple clouds, according to a results of a survey published last month.

Adoption of Cloud Foundry Application Runtime is on the rise among large and midsize enterprises, who are running new or transformed business apps across different clouds, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and OpenStack, as well as in VMware vSphere virtual machines.

The survey of 735 users consisting of developers, architects, IT executives and operators, sponsored by the Cloud Foundry Foundation, revealed that 53 percent are using it across multiple clouds. According to the survey that was conducted by the 70-member consortium, 54 percent of Cloud Foundry Application Runtime users are running it on AWS, followed by 40 percent on VMware's vSphere, 30 percent on Microsoft's Azure, 22 percent on OpenStack and 19 percent on Google Cloud Platform. An additional 17 percent said they are running it on various provider-managed PaaS, including IBM Bluemix.

"Whether companies come to Cloud Foundry early or late in their cloud journey, the ability to run Cloud Foundry Application Runtime across multiple clouds is critical to most users," according to an executive summary of the report based on the survey conducted by research and consulting firm ClearPath Strategies in late August.

Accelerated Development and Deployment Reported
Organizations that use the open-source Cloud Foundry Application Runtime are seeing accelerated application development cycles when building their cloud-native applications, the survey also found. A majority, 51 percent, said It previously took three months to deploy a cloud application with only 16 percent able to do so. Upon moving their applications to Cloud Foundry Application Runtime, 46 percent claim their cloud app development cycles of under a week, and among them 25 percent claimed it took less than a day with only 18 percent reporting application development cycles of more than three months.

Before using Cloud Foundry Application Runtime, 58 percent said cloud applications were developed and deployed manually, 52 percent used custom installed scripts, 38 percent relied on configuration management tools, 27 percent VM images, 20 percent Docker containers and 19 percent Linux packages.

A vast majority, 71 percent, said they are using or evaluating adding container orchestration and management to their Cloud Foundry Runtime environment now that the Cloud Foundry Container Runtime is available. Half of Cloud Foundry Application Runtime users are currently using containers, such as Docker, with another 35 percent evaluating or deploying containers.

The release of Cloud Foundry Container Runtime and the Kubernetes-based container management project has generated significant interest among Cloud Foundry Application Runtime users. Nearly three-quarters (71 percent) of Cloud Foundry Application Runtime users currently using or evaluating container engines, primarily based on Docker or the Kubernetes' rtk, and are now interested in adding container orchestration and management to their Cloud Foundry Application Runtime environment.

A majority, 54 percent, use Cloud Foundry to develop, deploy and manage microservices, with 38 percent using it for their Web sites, 31 percent for internal business applications, 27 percent for software-as-a-service (SaaS) and 8 percent for legacy software transformation.

Early Stages
While Cloud Foundry is a relatively new technology -- only 15 percent have used it for more than three years and 45 percent for less than a year with 61 percent in in the early stages, according to the survey -- a noteworthy 39 percent report they have broadly integrated it already. Also, while 49 percent of those adopting it are large enterprises such as Ford, Home Depot and GE, 39 percent are smaller enterprises and 39 percent are small and medium businesses (SMBs), according to the breakdown of respondents.

The number of applications in deployment are still relatively few. More than half, 54 percent, have only deployed less than 10 apps, with 22 percent claiming between 11 and 50 apps and only 8 percent have deployed more than 500.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry, the subsidiary of Dell Technologies that offers the leading commercial distribution of Cloud Foundry, is among the most widely consumed services in Azure, according to Microsoft. Redmond contributor Michael Otey explains how to deploy it in Azure, which you can find here.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/13/2017 at 11:35 AM