What’s New in Pivotal Cloud Foundry 1.6? Spring Cloud, .NET, and Docker Support Explained

Overview of Pivotal Cloud Foundry 1.6

Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) 1.6 is the commercial distribution of the open‑source Cloud Foundry platform. It adds native integration with a subset of Netflix OSS services through Spring Cloud, official support for Windows‑based .NET workloads, beta‑stage Docker container execution, and tighter integration with common ALM tools.

Supported Infrastructures

PCF 1.6 can be deployed on the following IaaS platforms:

vSphere

OpenStack

AWS

CenturyLink

Microsoft Azure

Spring Cloud Netflix OSS Services

PCF 1.6 bundles three Spring Cloud services that are built on Netflix OSS projects:

Config Service – a Git‑backed configuration store that supplies environment‑specific properties to Spring applications at runtime.

Service Registry – based on Netflix Eureka, provides automatic service discovery for Spring Boot apps running on PCF, eliminating hard‑coded service endpoints.

Circuit Breaker – implemented with Netflix Hystrix, isolates failures in distributed systems and enables fallback logic when a dependent service is unavailable.

These services are currently available only to Java/Spring applications; .NET apps cannot consume them in this release.

.NET Application Support

PCF 1.6 introduces official support for .NET workloads. .NET applications run as native processes on Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper‑V virtual machines. They are managed with the same cf CLI commands as other runtimes and receive identical Day‑2 operational features such as service discovery, health checks, and scaling. Provisioning of the underlying Windows VMs still relies on BOSH, and Spring Cloud services are not yet exposed to .NET apps.

Docker Container Support (Beta)

PCF can now schedule, health‑monitor, load‑balance, and log Docker containers. The platform pulls images from public registries (e.g., Docker Hub) using a supplied image URL. Limitations of the beta feature include:

Only user‑built images generated by the organization’s CI pipeline are supported.

Official images such as the Cassandra Docker image cannot be deployed directly.

PCF does not provide full Docker orchestration; it offers a container‑deployment pathway for specific use cases.

Lifecycle Management Integration

PCF 1.6 extends its toolchain integration:

Project tracking via Pivotal Tracker .

Source code repositories can be linked to GitLab .

Continuous integration is supported through CloudBee Jenkins .

Binary artifact storage is available via JFrog Artifactory .

These integrations enable a modern CI/CD pipeline for building and deploying microservices on PCF.

Key Operational Notes

All supported languages (Java, .NET, etc.) share the same CLI workflow and runtime management features.

Docker support is experimental; production use should consider the current constraints.

Spring Cloud services will be extended to .NET in future releases.