Swisscom info and facts
Swisscom is stepping up its commitment to Cloud Foundry in order to further promote the industry standard for Platform as a Service. The focus is on container provisioning with Kubernetes and a hybrid solution to enable applications also to run on Amazon Web Services.
Just in time for the Cloud Foundry Summit Europe in Basel, the rendezvous of the developer community, Swisscom is stepping up its commitment to Cloud Foundry. On the one hand Swisscom is actively participating in the "Cloud Foundry Container Runtime" project to provide containers with Kubernetes, and it is also currently testing a prototype for offering Swisscom Cloud Foundry on Amazon Web Services.
Container technologies are currently in fashion. Analysts such as 451 Research are forecasting annual growth rates of 40 percent for Docker and the like. This is not just about providing applications or microservices; the challenges lie in the orchestration and management of the containers. There are various orchestration solutions on the market for automatically providing, scaling and managing container applications. Among the open-source solutions, Kubernetes (K8s) is enjoying increasing popularity among the developers. Cloud Foundry has been assisting Kubernetes since 2016 with the "Cloud Foundry Container Runtime" project initiated by Pivotal and Google. The container runtime supplements the existing "application runtime" orchestration of the Cloud Foundry family.
Swisscom is now making an active contribution. Swisscom's cloud team already uses Kubernetes for some of its services such as Redis and MongoDB in the Swisscom Application Cloud. Marco Hochstrasser, Head of Cloud Platform Development at Swisscom and Member of the Board of Directors at the Cloud Foundry Foundation, comments: "As a founder member of Cloud Foundry, we are committed to getting the most for the further development of the standard. We have acquired know-how with Kubernetes over a period of two years that we now intend to contribute to the container runtime project." Five engineers have supported the project and Swisscom also sees an educational mandate in Switzerland and will pass on Kubernetes and container know-how at meet-ups and webinars. Swisscom is also continuously expanding its range of Kubernetes-compatible services for its own platform.
Swisscom is currently testing a prototype for making the Swisscom Cloud Foundry Platform available on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The hybrid solution enables applications to be transferred seamlessly from the Swisscom Enterprise Application Cloud in Switzerland to the global AWS zones and vice versa. The prototype is currently undergoing tests internally at Swisscom and a reputable industry client. Swisscom has to this end supplemented its own Enterprise Application Cloud with Amazon Web Services as an infrastructure layer. Marco Hochstrasser: "We are planning to expand the collaboration with AWS in order to provide the developer community with further services from AWS and in future act as a service provider for Cloud Foundry PaaS for a wide range of global clouds." Swisscom will reveal the new prototype at the Cloud Foundry Summit in Basel. The Cloud Foundry members will convene at the summit on 11/12 October 2017(opens in new tab) and discuss the latest technological achievements and the future strategy of the industry standard.
Cloud Foundry is an independent non-profit organisation for open-source software. Its leading open-source Platform as a Service allows applications to be constructed, tested, deployed and scaled more quickly and easily. Cloud Foundry offers developers the open framework and application services required for this. Further information can be found at www.cloudfoundry.org(opens in new tab)
Swisscom has been a member of the Cloud Foundry Foundation from the outset and has a seat on the Board of Directors. This non-profit foundation is developing an open-source Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution. As a gold member, Swisscom has been involved in developing the source code since August 2014 and exercises an influence on the platform's strategic direction. Since October 2015, Swisscom has been offering a public cloud facility for private software developers in Switzerland as well as for companies in Switzerland, Europe and the USA. This allows developers to provide applications in cloud environments at the touch of a button. Access is via the Swisscom Developer Portal. Since 2016, Swisscom has also offered corporate customers the Enterprise Application Cloud, a virtual private version with dedicated instances, an individual portal and invoicing. Swisscom accords data sovereignty the highest priority for both versions. Swisscom operates the cloud from its own cutting-edge Swiss data centres. Swisscom was in 2015 one of the first companies in the world to receive Cloud Foundry certification for deployment of the industry standard in Platform as a Service environments (PaaS). Since March 2017 the Swisscom Application Cloud has also been deployed as a single platform for implementing the global training and certification program for software developers.