Open Source Weekly: New Kubernetes community projects, SpringOne news, and more

5-minute read + demos
It was a big week at KubeCon, where we announced more Kubernetes community projects and partnerships that extend what you can do with Kubernetes and Azure, as well as new projects for serverless containers and Kubernetes-native DevOps.
For KubeCon highlights, details on new Pivotal Cloud Foundry support across Azure and Azure Stack, and more, check out this edition of the Open Source Weekly.

KubeCon + Cloud Native Cloud Foundry

Microsoft had over 70 of our resident Kubernetes community members in Austin for a sold-out KubeCon. Check out the top event themes that the team summarized for this year’s event.
Building on recent Kubernetes investments, like joining the CNCF and contributing the Draft and Brigade projects, the Azure team also announced several new Kubernetes projects and partnerships at KubeCon. Here are the highlights:
Kubernetes-native DevOps: new dashboard and visualization tool for pipelines: At the recent Open Source Summit EU in Prague, the team that brought you Helm and Draft announced Brigade, a scripting tool that helps developers and operations managers get their work done quickly by scripting together multiple tasks and executing them inside of containers in Kubernetes. The same team delivered again, announcing an open source reporting dashboard and visualization tool for Brigade pipelines called Kashti (“kawsh-tee” — or कश्ती, which is Hindi for kayak, dinghy, or small boat) built as a Kubernetes service. Learn more about Kashti and how to join the project here.
Partners enhance Kubernetes support for Azure and Windows Server Containers: As Microsoft works to make Azure the best place to run Kubernetes, and we continue to bring the Windows Server Containers ecosystem closer to the Kubernetes community, we’ll continue to forge new and enhance existing partnerships to make sure the tools you need are available and working great across our platforms. At KubeCon, the Azure team announced two new collaborations with Heptio and Tigera, as well as some progress we’ve made working with SIG Windows. Learn more here.

Brendan Burns and Joe Beda sign copies of “Kubernetes: Up & Running” at KubeCon.

Manage serverless containers using Kubernetes with the Virtual Kubelet: A new version of the Kubernetes connector, the Virtual Kubelet, can be used by customers to target Azure Container Instances (ACI) or any equivalent runtime. The Virtual Kubelet features a pluggable architecture that supports a variety of runtimes, and uses existing Kubernetes primitives, making it much easier to build on. We welcome the community to join us in empowering developers with serverless containers on Kubernetes and are proud that Hyper.sh is already joining us as a contributor.
Connect your Kubernetes applications (and more) to Azure services with Open Service Broker API: Microsoft announced a preview of the Open Service Broker for Azure (OSBA), an implementation of the Open Service Broker API for Azure services. In a multi-cloud, multi-platform world, developers need a standard way to connect their applications to the wealth of services available in the marketplace. The Open Service Broker API is an industry-wide effort to meet that demand, simply and securely. OSBA is the simplest, most flexible way to connect your applications to the suite of Azure services. For more, check out the Open Service Broker for Azure blog.

Ninja Sloth on GitHub 

Our resident ninja sloth, Brady, has been spotted at events around the world lately. We’ve gotten lots of requests for the various laptop stickers and t-shirts with his likeness and we’ve published them to GitHub here, including JavaScript, Node, Python, and Spring versions. Feel free to download the vector files and create your own adaptations of Brady. If you adapt Brady into a new design or variant, you can share it with us by opening a PR.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry support across Azure and Azure Stack: At SpringOne Platform, Microsoft and Pivotal announced improved support for Pivotal Cloud Foundry across Azure and Azure Stack. This is an important milestone in our partnership with Pivotal and in making our hybrid cloud, both public and private, a leading platform to run enterprise Java and Spring applications. Read more here.
Improved support for Java and Spring on Azure: From Spring Boot Starters for Azure to new Spring and Java Azure Functions extensions for Visual Studio Code, check out the list of feature improvements for Java and Spring fans here.
cloud-init for RHEL 7.4 and CentOS 7.4 preview: Microsoft announced a preview of provisioning RHEL 7.4 and CentOS 7.4 using cloud-init, which is an increasingly popular way to configure Linux VMs. This will allow you to migrate existing cloud-init configurations to Azure from other environments. cloud-init allows for VM customization during VM provisioning, adding to the existing Azure parameters used to create a VM. Learn more about the preview here.

Open Service Broker for Azure: Sean McKenna shows Scott Hanselman the Open Service Broker for Azure, an easy way to connect applications running in platforms like Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry to some of the most popular Azure services, using a standard, multi-cloud API.

Git at Enterprise Scale: An introduction to GVFS and why you should use it: The Git Virtual File System (GVFS) is an open source system that enables Git to operate at enterprise-scale. It makes using and managing massive Git repositories possible. In part 2 of their 3-part series, Jerry Nixon, Saeed Noursalehi and Christian Allred, show us what the developer experience looks like for Git with GVFS.

Here are some recent open source updates to docs.microsoft.com:
Azure Database for PostgreSQL: Azure Database for PostgreSQL is a relational database service based on the open source Postgres database engine. It is a fully managed database as a service offering capable of handling mission-critical workloads with predictable performance, security, high availability, and dynamic scalability. Develop applications with Azure Database for PostgreSQL leveraging the open source tools and platform of your choice. Learn how to use Azure Database for PostgreSQL with these quickstarts, tutorials, and samples.
Integrate with Azure-managed services using Open Service Broker for Azure (OSBA): Together with the Kubernetes Service Catalog, Open Service Broker for Azure (OSBA) allows developers to utilize Azure-managed services in Kubernetes. This guide focuses on deploying Kubernetes Service Catalog, Open Service Broker for Azure (OSBA), and applications that use Azure-managed services using Kubernetes. Check out the how-to guidance.
Windows Subsystem for Linux: The Windows Subsystem for Linux lets developers run Linux environments — including most command-line tools, utilities, and applications — directly on Windows, unmodified, without the overhead of a virtual machine. Documentation was added to docs.microsoft.com here.
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