Users of the existing beta Cloud Foundry hosted service cloudfoundry.com were sent emails this week explaining that we are almost ready to launch version 2 of the service. If you’re a current user, or if you have signed up in the past, dig through your inbox filters for the email (mine ended up under the “Promotions” label thanks to Gmail’s auto-filing magic).
Cloud Foundry v2, sometimes known as “next-gen” or ng, is a big set of updates. I wrote about some of them in my last blog post, and also noted there that we are going to run the new version on AWS.
Some of the things worth getting excited about are:
- custom domains (the number one thing I’ve been asked for after every talk!)
- buildpacks – the ability to use “any” language, framework or runtime that has a buildpack, not just Java, Ruby, or node.js (Matt and Brian seem to be competing to find interesting ones!). By the way, you should totally be trying your Spring and Groovy apps on v2! 🙂
- organisations and spaces – the ability to share apps with a team and collaborate
- a web management console for your apps
- a Marketplace, which we will be expanding over time, allowing you to bind third-party services in to your applications.
These are all big changes, and there are many more under the hood (Warden, a new staging process, a new router… it’s a very long list).
My colleague Nima posted a nice slide deck giving a more technical overview of some of the internal changes:
In addition, our demo ninja Dekel has shared a great video of some of the things you can expect from version 2:
Over the past 24 hours or so I’ve been doing my best to respond to questions on Twitter and elsewhere. The existing v1 version will go away on June 30th, so if you are using it now you’ll want to look at migrating apps in the next couple of weeks, and we’ll share more on that soon. The new version will have pricing attached, with a free trial period too. Of course, the code is always available on Github and you’re free to spin up your own CF instance running on AWS, OpenStack or vSphere.
I know folks will have many more questions about the specifics over the next week or so, and we will be looking out for them.
Supercharging the community
As we have grown closer to v2 release, there has been ever-increasing activity in the vcap-dev mailing list and around the community. We’ve had more and more code contributions (so much so that I recently wrote a blog post about how you can contribute to the CF core projects). Projects like the cf-vagrant-installer and cf-nise-installer are helping people get local environments running very quickly. Our friends from PistonCloud released their turtles project. Best of all, the super Dr Nic Williams recently set up a cloudfoundry-community organisation on Github to act as an umbrella for many of these community contributions (info on how to join is here).
Let’s talk! (in London)
Over the past year or so I’ve spent a lot of time out in the developer community in London, and it has become apparent that a lot of folks are interested, already contributing to the community, or in some cases, already running their own CF instances in production 🙂
So, I thought it would be a good idea to do some bridge building and bring folks together to get to know one another. A brief unscientific Twitter poll suggested that other people liked the idea, so we’ve stuck a stake in the ground (evening of July 3rd) and I set up an Eventbrite page for a meet up. If you’d like to chat with people about Cloud Foundry over a drink, do sign up and come along. I’ll sort out a venue in the next couple of weeks, but I imagine it will be “around Shoreditch” or possibly over towards Waterloo, for purely selfish reasons! Totally informal, this is just a community meet up, so I’m not planning to do slides and talks and stuff – just come and share ideas or ask questions!
Related articles
- Cloud Foundry has gone Pivotal – so what’s new? (andypiper.co.uk)
- Clojure on Cloud Foundry (nofluffjuststuff.com)
- Want to Contribute to Cloud Foundry? Come on in! (cloudfoundry.com)
