The Cloud Foundry journey: why teams are looking elsewhere
Imagine deploying software in 2010: developers would spend weeks crafting code, only to watch it stumble in production as operations teams grappled with incompatible environments and conflicting dependencies. This "works on my machine" problem wasn't just frustrating – it was costing organizations millions in delayed releases and lost productivity. Development and operations teams spoke different languages, used different tools, and often worked in complete isolation from each other.
Cloud Foundry emerged in 2011 with an ambitious vision to solve this disconnect. By introducing a standardized platform that could automatically handle deployment complexities, it promised to transform how organizations delivered software. Developers could focus on writing code while operations teams managed a consistent platform – a bridge across the traditional dev-ops divide.
But technology rarely stands still. As cloud computing matured and Kubernetes revolutionized container orchestration, organizations found themselves at a crossroads. Cloud Foundry, once the pioneer of modern application platforms, now shares the stage with an expanding ecosystem of cloud-native tools. Today's technical leaders face a critical question: should they continue investing in Cloud Foundry's mature but complex ecosystem, or is it time to explore modern alternatives that might better serve their cloud-native future?
In this article, we'll trace Cloud Foundry's journey from revolutionary platform to today's reality, examining why organizations are reevaluating their platform strategies in an increasingly Kubernetes-centric world.
Cloud Foundry is an open-source Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that enables organizations to deploy and manage applications across multiple cloud environments. What made it truly revolutionary wasn't just its technology – it was its philosophy. Before Cloud Foundry, most DevOps tools were built primarily for operations teams, merely attempting to copy development patterns. Cloud Foundry broke this mold by creating the first truly shared platform for all teams involved in the software lifecycle.
The platform's success was driven by three strategic masterstrokes. First, it recognized that enterprise software was predominantly built in Java and .NET, not newer languages like Ruby or Python that most DevOps tools catered to. By making Spring Boot a first-class citizen and partnering with Netflix (a prominent Java shop), Cloud Foundry became the gateway for traditional enterprise developers to enter the modern cloud era. Second, its pricing model brilliantly aligned with how enterprises were already buying WebSphere and WebLogic licenses, making it easier for organizations to justify the switch. Finally, with a massive sales organization of 900 people and the recruitment of industry luminaries, Cloud Foundry didn't just build technology – it built a movement.
The platform's story began in 2009 with three VMware engineers who saw a problem that needed solving. Mark Lucovsky, Derek Collison, and Vadim Spivak weren't just building another tool – they were reimagining how organizations could deploy software. By April 2011, their vision became reality with Cloud Foundry's launch as the industry's first open-source PaaS.
In 2012, VMware and EMC decided to give it room to grow by spinning it off into Pivotal Software – a strategic move that was far more than a mere corporate restructuring. Pivotal Software became a dedicated innovation hub that provided Cloud Foundry with the organizational independence and resources needed to mature as an open-source platform. This allowed Cloud Foundry to develop more flexibly, attract broader industry collaboration, and accelerate its technological innovation.
Then came Dell Technologies' acquisition of EMC in 2016, expanding Cloud Foundry's reach into the enterprise world. This acquisition further amplified Pivotal's significance, embedding Cloud Foundry more deeply into enterprise technology infrastructures.
The story took another turn in 2019 when Pivotal hit rough waters – experiencing almost 50% stock plunge after a tough quarter. VMware saw an opportunity to bring Cloud Foundry back home. The timing couldn't have been better: Cloud Foundry had just cracked the code on Kubernetes integration, and developers were flocking to the platform. Wall Street loved the move, sending Pivotal's stock soaring 70%.
Cloud Foundry's relationship with Kubernetes marked a critical turning point in its history. When Kubernetes emerged as the de-facto standard for container orchestration, Cloud Foundry faced a decisive moment: adapt or risk becoming obsolete.
The challenge was both technical and cultural. Cloud Foundry had invested heavily in Diego, its own container orchestration system, and many in the organization believed it was technically superior to Kubernetes. While competitors like Red Hat's OpenShift quickly embraced Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry's response was more hesitant.
Eventually, the platform launched "cf-for-k8s," allowing Cloud Foundry to run on Kubernetes infrastructure. But this transition came with significant costs:
- Added complexity: Organizations now needed expertise in both Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes
- Cultural resistance: Many teams struggled to shift from Cloud Foundry's opinions about how things should work to Kubernetes' more flexible approach
- Integration challenges: The marriage of two complex systems created new operational hurdles
This period highlighted a crucial lesson in enterprise software: sometimes being technically superior isn't enough. The ability to adapt to changing market dynamics and embrace industry standards can be more important than maintaining a perfectly crafted, but isolated, technical solution.
The cloud platforms landscape has evolved dramatically since Cloud Foundry's early days, presenting several significant challenges for teams:
- Cost management burden: Organizations face escalating financial pressures that extend far beyond initial licensing fees. The platform demands substantial investments in infrastructure, specialized training programs, and continuous maintenance. Many companies have found themselves maintaining dedicated teams solely for Cloud Foundry operations.
- The platform engineering paradox: What initially seemed like a strength – the rise of Platform Engineering teams – revealed a critical flaw. As these teams customized their deployments to meet specific organizational needs, they created technical debt that grew increasingly difficult to manage. Each upgrade became more complex, requiring careful navigation of custom configurations and integrations. When platform experts inevitably left for new opportunities, organizations struggled to maintain these highly customized deployments.
- Maintenance complexity: Modern teams require specialists with expertise not only in Cloud Foundry's core systems but also in its interactions with cloud providers, container orchestration systems, and Kubernetes integration. This complexity often results in extended deployment timelines and heightened risks during updates.
- The DIY integration challenge: Despite selecting a platform that promised to abstract away infrastructure complexity, teams frequently find themselves constructing and maintaining numerous custom integrations and workflows, requiring custom monitoring solutions, specialized deployment pipelines, and complex networking configurations.
The UK Government Digital Service (GDS) provides a compelling case study of how the cloud-native landscape has evolved beyond Cloud Foundry. Their GOV.UK PaaS, built on Cloud Foundry, initially served as a central platform for government digital services. After seven successful years of operation from 2015 to 2022, GDS made the strategic decision to sunset the platform – a decision that perfectly illustrates the changing dynamics in the platform space.
The GOV.UK PaaS Journey
During its lifetime, GOV.UK PaaS demonstrated the immense value that Cloud Foundry could provide:
- Supported over 172 digital services across 60+ departments and agencies
- Maintained 99.95% uptime with only one major incident in 7 years
- Handled over 122 deployments per day across 3,200 applications
- Proved crucial during the COVID-19 pandemic, enabling rapid service deployment and scaling
However, several factors led to its decommissioning:
- Market evolution: Major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP significantly improved their offerings and reduced barriers to entry for digital teams.
- Organizational maturity: Government departments built stronger in-house cloud engineering capabilities and increasingly adopted Kubernetes-based architectures.
- Technology inflection point: The platform reached a crossroads requiring either significant technical architecture investment or strategic redirection.
- Resource optimization: As a central government service, GDS needed to focus resources on products with the highest impact and growth potential.
This transition highlights a broader industry pattern: organizations that adopted Cloud Foundry are now facing similar strategic decisions as their platforms age and the technology landscape evolves.
Organizations looking to transition from Cloud Foundry today have several paths forward, each with its own considerations and implications:
Major cloud providers now offer enterprise-grade Kubernetes platforms that can serve as a foundation for your cloud-native journey. These services, such as GKE Enterprise, AKS, and OpenShift Cloud, provide several advantages.
The primary benefit is rapid deployment capability - what once took months to set up can now be accomplished in minutes. These platforms handle complex infrastructure management, including node provisioning, scaling, and security updates.
However, organizations should understand that while these services excel at container orchestration, they don't provide the same level of developer experience that Cloud Foundry offers out of the box. Technical teams will need to build additional layers on top of these services to achieve similar developer workflows.
This might include implementing continuous deployment pipelines, setting up monitoring and logging solutions, and creating developer-friendly interfaces. The total cost of ownership (TCO) calculation should factor in both the direct platform costs and the engineering effort required to build and maintain these additional layers.
Some organizations, particularly those with specific compliance requirements or unique technical needs, opt to build their own platforms on Kubernetes. This approach offers maximum flexibility but comes with significant responsibilities.
Creating a custom platform requires extensive expertise in Kubernetes, networking, security, and platform design. Organizations need to invest in a dedicated platform engineering team that can not only build but also maintain and evolve the platform over time.
This team will be responsible for creating developer tools, establishing deployment workflows, implementing security controls, and managing the entire platform lifecycle. The advantages include complete control over the platform's architecture and features, the ability to optimize for specific use cases, and independence from vendor-specific implementations.
However, organizations should be prepared for the ongoing commitment this approach requires - from keeping up with Kubernetes releases to maintaining custom tooling and documentation.
A new generation of platforms, including solutions like Northflank, aims to provide the developer-friendly experience of Cloud Foundry while leveraging modern Kubernetes infrastructure. These platforms offer several key benefits.
They maintain the simplicity of the cf push experience while providing access to native Kubernetes capabilities. Development teams can continue using familiar workflows, while operations teams benefit from standard Kubernetes management tools and practices.
These platforms often include built-in solutions for common needs like automated SSL certificate management, application scaling, and logging integration. Organizations should evaluate these platforms based on their specific needs, considering factors like support for existing applications, integration capabilities with current tools, and the platform's roadmap alignment with their technical strategy.
Many organizations opt for a gradual transition strategy that maintains existing Cloud Foundry deployments while incrementally moving workloads to new platforms. This approach offers several advantages.
Teams can learn and adapt to new technologies without the pressure of a complete platform switch. Critical applications can continue running on the familiar Cloud Foundry infrastructure while new projects adopt modern platforms. This approach also allows organizations to validate their chosen migration path with lower-risk workloads before committing to full migration.
However, running multiple platforms introduces additional operational complexity. Organizations need to maintain expertise in both systems, manage separate deployment pipelines, and potentially deal with cross-platform service integration. Clear governance and migration criteria become essential to manage this complexity effectively.
Northflank emerges as a breath of fresh air for teams exhausted by traditional platform complexities. Born from the same vision that drove Cloud Foundry – making software deployment simple and developer-friendly – Northflank takes a radically different approach by embracing Kubernetes natively.
Its architecture reflects deep lessons learned from Cloud Foundry's journey, particularly in its innovative separation of control plane and data plane. The control plane runs in the cloud, offering rapid evolution and easy updates, while the data plane can be deployed wherever organizations need it – in their own VPC or on-premise – providing the security and control enterprises demand.
Like Cloud Foundry, Northflank maintains crucial separations between code and configuration, build time and runtime, and development and production environments. However, it achieves this without requiring organizations to maintain large platform engineering teams. By providing a consistent experience across its web UI, CLI, and API, Northflank delivers on the original promise of a truly unified platform for modern software delivery.
For organizations feeling the weight of maintaining complex platform engineering teams, Northflank offers a compelling proposition: all the isolation and security of Cloud Foundry, but with Northflank serving as your platform engineering team. This approach dramatically reduces the operational burden while maintaining the developer-first philosophy that made Cloud Foundry revolutionary in the first place.
Think of it like this: Where Cloud Foundry required teams to become platform specialists, Northflank lets developers do what they do best – write code. By leveraging Kubernetes' powerful infrastructure, the platform dramatically simplifies what used to take months of configuration into a process that can be completed in just hours.
For technical leaders caught between legacy platforms and the promise of cloud-native technologies, Northflank represents more than just a tool. It's a strategic approach that bridges the gap between traditional deployment models and the future of software delivery. We'd love to show you how Northflank can help. Schedule a live demo here, or get started with Northflank here.
