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by ForHackernews 803 days ago
> If everyone ultimately wants the usability of Heroku - which I can believe - why didn't Cloud Foundry take off?

Cloud Foundry isn't like Heroku, it's more like "build your own AWS" or maybe "build against this shim layer so you can make a credible threat to migrate when your cloud provider jacks up their prices".

The target audience isn't application developers, it's CTOs and CFOs.
1 comments
pcthrowaway 803 days ago
I mean.. from the user side (aka the developers deploying applications within the org) Cloud Foundry was a lot like Heroku. I think the Buildpack concept (incepted at Heroku) was picked up by the Cloud Foundry Foundation and developed in lockstep with Heroku. For a while there was a lot of pollination between both projects.

The reason IMO that Cloud Foundry didn't catch on is that from the admin side, deployment of vanilla CF was a nightmare, and maintenance could be challenging.

You could pay for an Cloud Foundry distribution with guardrails, but that ended up being $$$ and still required having employees with systems/ops knowledge if you weren't just deploying to the cloud provider du jour anyway.

I think CF had its golden years before k8s really started to catch on. Then there was a push by a lot of companies to bring CF to k8s (I was working at one such company as it went from the Cloud Foundry Distribution -> Cloud Foundry Distribution on K8s journey). I think these could have caught on if someone could have made it work in a truly seamless way, but unfortunately all the abstractions for bridging CF concepts to a K8s world developed in pursuit of this goal ended up being leaky, and requiring your customers to have CF domain knowledge atop K8s domain knowledge to successfully deploy and maintain their in-house CF, which proved to be too tall an order.

Unfortunately, CF seems to have fallen by the wayside now (though I'm sure there will still be companies running it for 20 years if their needs don't outgrow the capabilities of their mostly-working deployments) and AFAIK nothing has really taken its place.

I haven't had the opportunity to try this yet, but Kubevela (https://www.cncf.io/projects/kubevela/) looks like it could be the closest thing to a modernized CF-like experience on top of K8s that should (hopefully) be more sensible to deploy and manage. Would really love to hear thoughts from people who have used both though.

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