Stuck in Pivotal Cloud Foundry? Make Your Move to Kubernetes Easy

Is your organization feeling stuck using Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF), now known as Tanzu Application Service (TAS or sometimes VMware Cloud Foundation)? You're not alone. Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware in late 2023. To make the most of their acquisition, Broadcom is trying to squeeze money out of VMware — leading to skyrocketing costs for PCF (aka Tanzu) customers. You don’t have to remain bound to PCF, though — you can move to Kubernetes, and we can help.

Why Move from PCF?

• Licensing Costs: PCF licensing fees can be significant, depending on the size of your organization and its unique requirements. Plus you’ll pay support and maintenance costs, which grow as usage of PCF grows in your organization.
• Vendor Lock-in: PCF ties you to a specific vendor, making it more challenging to move data and applications to another cloud provider. This lock-in makes it harder for you to choose the tools and services that work best for your organization’s apps and services.
• Lagging Tech Adoption: PCF focuses on stability over adopting the latest technologies, which are all focused on Kubernetes.
• Resource Efficiency: Resource allocation in PCF may not be optimal, leading to higher costs and performance bottlenecks.
• Scalability: PCF prioritizes simplicity over the more fine-grained controls available in Kubernetes environments. That could mean your organization encounters more challenges when trying to adjust resources for fluctuating workloads.

Kubernetes: Fine-Grained Control and Flexibility

Kubernetes is the de facto standard for container orchestration. Here's where it shines:

• Scalability on Demand: Kubernetes excels at scaling applications based on real-time needs. When properly managed, this results in efficient resource utilization and cost savings.
• Thriving Tooling Ecosystem: Because CNCF tooling is all built around Kubernetes, you get all the benefits of the latest technology.
• Cloud-Native: Kubernetes integrates with DevOps practices and fosters a culture of rapid iteration and deployment.
• Open Source: As an open-source project, Kubernetes gives you freedom from vendor lock-in. You can choose the tools and cloud providers that best suit your organization’s needs for each application and services.

Kubernetes Migration Made Easy

Many PCF/Tanzu customers are leaving in the face of skyrocketing prices and increased vendor lock-in. We believe you should have a choice in how and where you deploy your applications, so we’ve teamed up with SuperOrbital to make that migration easy.

The SuperOrbital team has deep experience with both PCF/Tanzu and Kubernetes, offering skill, experience, and judgment you can rely on to translate your workloads, services, and custom BOSH releases to Kubernetes. SuperOrbital doesn’t just lift-and-shift your applications — they provide the best in-depth training in the industry so you know where you’ve been, where you’re going, and how to get there.

This is where Fairwinds’ Managed Kubernetes comes in. Our experienced team builds your new production-grade Kubernetes infrastructure in whichever cloud environment you choose and its people-led service includes 24x7 monitoring and incident response for your Kubernetes infrastructure so you can deploy with confidence.

Here's how Fairwinds supports your move to K8s:

Infrastructure

Fairwinds builds infra using Terraform, provides key metrics for auto scaling applications, and monitors for and patches the latest common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs).

Database & Networking

Fairwinds migrates from Pivotal managed services to your cloud’s managed services, provisions with Terraform, and writes Kubernetes network policies to control container-to-container communication.

Applications

Fairwinds converts BOSH deployments to Kubernetes deployments, writes CI/CD pipelines to build containers and deploy to Kubernetes, uses HorizontalPodAutoscaler (HPA) to horizontally scale applications to meet demand, and maintains PCF’s self-healing capabilities with Kubernetes scheduler and Kubernetes readiness, liveness, and startup probes.

Developer Self-Service

Fairwinds creates a cf-push like experience for developers using GitOps, ingress controller, cert-manager, and other open source tooling. It also manages fine-grained developer access and permissions with your cloud’s identity and access management (IAM) solution and Kubernetes role-based access control (RBAC).

Choose Your Next Infrastructure

If you’re ready to break free from the limitations and excessive costs of PCF and embrace the power and flexibility of Kubernetes, we can help. The combined expertise of Fairwinds’ Managed Kubernetes and SuperOrbital's migration and training services will accelerate your time to value and support the move from PCF to K8s by ensuring your infrastructure is reliable and secure without locking you in or increasing your costs.

Learn how you can easily move from PCF to Kubernetes — contact Fairwinds today!