How Pivotal’s Kubo Bridges Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes for Enterprise PaaS

Background

Large enterprises often run a mix of cloud‑native workloads and legacy commercial applications that require direct access to the Kubernetes scheduler. Cloud Foundry provides a platform‑as‑a‑service model, but customers also need the flexibility to manage the underlying infrastructure themselves. BOSH is an open‑source toolchain that automates the deployment, lifecycle management, health monitoring, and zero‑downtime updates of large distributed systems. By abstracting the underlying cloud, BOSH can give Cloud Foundry a consistent runtime environment across any infrastructure.

Kubo Project

Kubo is a joint effort by Pivotal (now part of VMware) and Google that integrates the BOSH toolchain with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and other Kubernetes clusters. The goal is to enable Cloud Foundry‑style application deployment and management on top of Kubernetes while preserving the operational model that BOSH provides.

Key Technical Capabilities

Container orchestration: Kubo leverages the full power of Kubernetes for both current and future releases, allowing Cloud Foundry workloads to run as native Kubernetes pods.

BOSH‑driven lifecycle: All cluster components—Kubernetes masters, etcd, and worker nodes—are provisioned, upgraded, and healed through BOSH releases, ensuring reproducible and self‑healing deployments.

Built‑in high availability: BOSH creates HA configurations for Kubernetes master nodes and the etcd key‑value store, providing fault tolerance without manual scripting.

Support for existing enterprise applications: Applications written in traditional languages can be packaged as Cloud Foundry apps and run on the Kubo‑managed Kubernetes cluster, while engineers retain the ability to access the underlying platform when needed.

Shared tooling with Cloud Foundry: Operators use the same BOSH CLI commands and manifests to manage both Cloud Foundry components and the underlying Kubernetes infrastructure, reducing operational overhead.

How Kubo Uses BOSH

BOSH acts as the orchestrator for the entire stack. A BOSH director is first deployed on the target cloud (e.g., GCP, AWS, or on‑prem). BOSH releases that contain the Kubernetes binaries, etcd, and supporting add‑ons are then uploaded to the director. A BOSH manifest describes the desired topology—number of master nodes, etcd quorum, worker node pools, networking, and storage configurations. When the manifest is applied, BOSH creates VMs or containers, installs the software, configures certificates, and continuously monitors health. If a node fails, BOSH automatically recreates it and re‑joins it to the cluster.

Typical Deployment Workflow

Install the BOSH CLI on a workstation:

curl -L https://bosh.io/releases/bosh-cli-7.0.0-linux-amd64 -o /usr/local/bin/bosh && chmod +x /usr/local/bin/bosh

Deploy a BOSH director on the chosen cloud (e.g., using bosh create-env with an IaaS‑specific cloud config).

Upload the Kubernetes and etcd BOSH releases: bosh upload-release kubernetes-release.tgz and bosh upload-release etcd-release.tgz.

Create a BOSH manifest that defines the Kubernetes cluster topology (master count, etcd quorum, worker VM types, network CIDRs, etc.).

Deploy the manifest: bosh -e my-director deploy kubernetes-manifest.yml. BOSH provisions the VMs, installs Kubernetes components, and configures HA.

Manage the cluster with standard BOSH commands ( bosh ssh, bosh restart, bosh delete-deployment) and with Kubernetes tools ( kubectl) for application‑level operations.

Enterprise Benefits

The combination of BOSH and Kubernetes in Kubo delivers:

Consistent, repeatable deployments across any cloud provider.

Self‑healing and zero‑downtime upgrade capabilities inherited from BOSH.

High‑availability control plane (masters and etcd) without custom scripting.

Unified operational model for both Cloud Foundry applications and the underlying Kubernetes infrastructure.

Ability to run legacy production workloads alongside cloud‑native microservices on the same cluster.

Current Status

Kubo has been publicly released and can be installed on any cloud to provision and manage Kubernetes clusters. Ongoing collaboration between Pivotal and Google continues to evolve the project, adding new releases and extending support for additional cloud environments.