It seems everyone is evaluating or even using Kubernetes these days. But even Brendan Burns (co-creator of Kubernetes) agrees that it’s not easy to use. And it was not meant to be.

As adoption of Kubernetes increases, the community is working to make it easier to use. In fact, Google and Pivotal worked together to create Cloud Foundry Container Runtime (CFCR) to bring the benefits of Kubernetes to the Cloud Foundry community. CFCR is powered by one of the most amazing technologies that has come out of the Cloud Foundry community: BOSH.

So how does Cloud Foundry integrate with Kubernetes? Kubernetes brings many additional capabilities to Cloud Foundry including abstraction, which is fundamentally at a lower level than what you’re going to see out of the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime (CFAR). It allows you to run any existing Docker containers you already have, can handle replication and scaling in the most efficient manner, can integrate with persistent disks in VSphere, and allows users to have rolling updates for workloads. In a nutshell, Kubernetes brings a lot of value to Cloud Foundry users.

However, it does pose some challenges when you plan to use it in production. Security is one of the many areas that need to be taken into consideration. Thanks to the modular design of Kubernetes, which enables components to run independent of each other, it can also be a consideration in production.

“There are a lot of things to think about when deploying Kubernetes in production because it’s essentially infrastructure and that means that you have to think about all the ramifications that come with that infrastructure,” said Kaiting Chen, Staff Engineer, VMware.

BOSH mitigates most of these problems while bringing the benefits of Kubernetes to users. In addition to making it easier to test everything and resurrecting VMs, the CFCR community continues to add new features. A good example is BOSH DNS that allows users to remove load balancer out of the equation. It provides Master HA, so if the master goes down then it removes it from the DNS record.

During the Cloud Foundry Summit, Oleksandr Slynko, Principal Software Engineer, Pivotal and Chen talked about these new features of CFCR that make life easier for Cloud Foundry users: