GrapeUp’s Take on Creating Stacks on Open Source – InApps 2022

Cloud Foundry Foundation sponsored this podcast.

GrapeUp’s Take On Creating Stacks On Open Source

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A major theme at Cloud Foundry Summit Europe in Basel last week was about how to leverage open source architectures while picking and choosing from the best-and-brightest tools to complete a stack.

Daniel Hekman, head of enterprise business development for the GrapeUp, a consultancy with Cloud Foundry expertise, and Roman Swoszowski, GrapeUp vice president of cloud research and development, discussed how to combine both worlds with Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of InApps, during this podcast.

“We see customers often prefer to use open source technologies, open source Cloud Foundry in particular, and of course, they also use other tools around that, so they can build a complete stack around their workloads and around their applications,” Swoszowski said. “We thought, why don’t we package that and make it easier for them to set up?”

In this way, organizations often seek a more “curated approach” when leveraging an open source alternative, Hekman said. Developers often say “‘we want to work with the tool ourselves but we also want some help,’” Hekman said. “They say ‘So, I don’t want to go all in the left way and I don’t want to go all in the right way. So I want to touch it myself but I do need some help.’”

Firms also want to be taught how to work with those new technologies, Hekman said. He described what he thought was a “perfect fit” in GrapeUp’s offering of a Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) functionality in a single platform. With our heritage and DNA of being able to help build cloud native applications, we can offer much more services around it,” Hekman said. “So for us, it feels like a natural fit for these companies that want to leverage those tools and do it fast, and I think, this works really well.”

GrapeUp, for example, relies heavily on Cloud Foundry BOSH for its deployments and distribution. “BOSH is one of the tools we’ve been working with on a daily basis for a long time now,” Swoszowski said. “It is also an essential part of our product, where we use it for, of course, deploying release management.”

As part of the overall new stack DevOps culture and practices that continue to thrive, organizations are also often actively expanding their development teams. “It definitely starts with the developer experience and how that will leverage going faster to the market,” Hekman said. “[It is not] just the large enterprise companies that already for several years have gotten into the amazing thing that Cloud Foundry [represents]. But we’re also seeing smaller companies wanting to leverage those technologies to help the developer go fast,” Hekman said. “This is because we feel at the end of the day if the developer can deliver more and better and faster and safer; that’s where it starts and that’s where it ends.”

One scenario might be to use BOSH applications with Cloud Foundry or to put them into a Kubernetes container runtime and “just focus on building the application rather than struggling with the whole app packaging, building, delivery process,” Swoszowski said. “These are all automated — the speed in this case also is built into the whole product itself because you can set it up within days and start building on top of that. So it is preconfigured, ready to use, but of course, can be modified, adjusted and customized the way a customer needs it.”

DevOps plays an essential role. “We also want to bridge the tension you see between IT and the business and we also want to have something that is curated for the operators from that more DevOps philosophy,” Hekman said. “And so with our experience as a company, starting out way back to build software for startups; we really understand the need for competitive products” that are scalable and can also be modified.

In this Edition:

2:06: How GrapeUp’s distribution of Cloud Foundry has come about and evolved.
5:04: What’s your point of view about BOSH, and how do you think about it in terms of this distribution?
7:44: How did you build DevOps, developer efficiency, and developer experience into the distribution you’re building?
9:35: What are some pain points developers are facing now?
11:26: How are you trying to tune the developer experience for that?
15:22: How are you using cloud native technologies at GrapeUp?