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Using Buildpacks to Provision OCI-Compliant Container Images

It never fails that the CNCF seems be cooking up something interesting in their ecosystem. In my free time, I find myself in a habit of playing in the Sandbox to see what new cutting edge tools I can add to my collection. It is my goal today to introduce you to a project at the Sandbox stage known as "Buildpacks".

What Are Buildpacks?

Buildpacks are an OCI-compliant tool for building applications that serve as a higher-level abstraction as opposed to writing Dockerfiles. The project was spawned by Pivotal and Heroku in 2011 and joined the Cloud Native Sandbox in October 2018. Since then, Buildpacks has been adopted by Cloud Foundry and other PaaS, such as Gitlab, Knative, Deis, Dokku, and Drie.

The project seeks to unify the buildpack ecosystems with a platform-to-buildpack contract that is well-defined and incorporates years of learning from maintaining production-grade buildpacks at both Pivotal and Heroku.

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Running Docker Containers on Cloud Foundry

If you are an experienced developer already familiar with Docker, here's a quick way to just deploy your containers into the cloud without having to worry about setting up and managing a Kubernetes cluster. And also important...it comes for free using Cloud Foundry.

Let's start by creating a simple NodeJS application locally using 'npm init', give your app a name e.g. 'tinyapp' and use 'server.js' as the entry point. 

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A Bootiful Podcast: Data Sovereignty, Microservices, Cloud Foundry, and More

Hi Spring fans! In this installment of a Bootiful Podcast, I, Josh Long, welcome Josh Mckenty - or “better Josh,” as I affectionately call him - to the show to discuss Pivotal, Cloud Foundry, Python, microservices, and data sovereignty, among other things.


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Devs Will Just Dev! The Cloud Foundry Promise

“Every company is a technology company” said Peter Sondergaard, Gartner's former executive vice president of research, and evidence of this is all around us. But it was not so easy becoming a technology company, as the entry barriers were high. Besides developing their business propositions, companies had to develop, maintain and operate the platform on top of which their businesses (i.e. applications) run. 

The rise of DevOps culture, automated pipelines, container technologies, and microservices, all contributed to an improved situation. And all these are still evolving and getting increasingly popular. But still, businesses have to deal with things outside the development of their specific business propositions. There is still an operational load to carry, and the load seems to be moved now to the hands of developers. Cloud Foundry helps to eliminate this operational load and the need for building platforms and utility components that have no relation to your business propositions. Cloud Foundry makes it possible to develop only what contributes to your bottom line while it takes care of the rest. It allows developers to just develop!