Pivotal and Heroku team up to create Cloud Native Buildpacks for Kubernetes

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Pivotal Inc., a software and services firm, announced yesterday that it has teamed up with Heroku to create Cloud Native Buildpacks for Kubernetes and beyond. Cloud Native Buildpacks turn source code into production-ready Docker images that are OCI image compatible and is based around the popular Buildpack model. The new project is aimed at allowing developers to get more productive with Kubernetes.

The Cloud Foundry Buildpacks team also released a selection of next-gen Cloud Foundry buildpacks that are compatible with the Cloud Native Buildpacks. This will allow users to try buildpacks out on Pivotal Container Service (PKS) and Pivotal Application Service (PAS).

“The project aims to deliver a consistent platform-to-buildpack contract for use in more places. The interface defined by this contract is informed by learnings from maintaining production-grade buildpacks for years at both Pivotal and Heroku” states the Pivotal team.

With the new Cloud Native Buildpacks, you can create containers by just pushing the code without using any runtime dependencies. On “cf” pushing the custom code, buildpacks automatically add in the framework dependencies and create an application “droplet” that can be run on the platform. This droplet model allows Cloud Foundry to handle all the dependency updates.

Application runtimes can also be updated by pulling in the latest buildpacks and rebuilding a droplet. Cloud Native Buildpacks expand on this idea and build an OCI (Open Container) image, capable of running on any platform.“We believe developers will love the simplicity of this single command to get a production quality container when they prefer not to author and maintain their own Dockerfile”, states the Pivotal team.

Other reasons why Cloud Native Buildpacks are a step ahead than traditional buildpacks:

Portability through OCI standard. Cloud Native Buildpacks can directly produce the OCI Images from source code. This makes Cloud Native Buildpacks much more portable, making them easy to use with Kubernetes and Knative.
Better modularity. Cloud Native Buildpacks are modular, offering platform operators more control over how developers can build their code during runtime.
Speed. Cloud Native Buildpacks build faster because of advanced build caching, layer reuse, and data deduplication.
Fast troubleshooting. Cloud Native Buildpacks helps troubleshoot production issues much faster as they can be used in a developer local environment.
Reproducible builds. Cloud Native Buildpacks allow reproducible container image builds.

What next?

Pivotal team states that Cloud Native Buildpacks need some more work for it to be ready for enterprise scenarios. Pivotal is currently exploring adding three new features such as image promotion, operator control, and automated image patching.

For image promotion, Pivotal is exploring a build service effective at image updating. This would allow the developers to promote images through environments, and cross PCF foundations. Also, Pivotal is exploring a declarative configuration model which will deliver new images to your registry whenever your configuration falls out of sync.

“The best developers strive to eliminate toil from their lives. These engineers figure that if a task doesn’t add value, it should be automated..with Cloud Native Buildpacks, developers can happily remove.. toil from their jobs”, states Pivtol team.

For more information, check out the official Pivotal Blog.