Stick with Cloud Foundry
Given as "Making and Maintaining the Case To Stay on Cloud Foundry" at Cloud Foundry Summit 2026 (Heidelberg, Germany) on .
Platforms that work get replaced anyway. This talk is about why that keeps happening and what platform teams can do about it: the real length of a replatforming cycle once you count the scrappy years and the budget cycle, the ops-to-developer ratios Cloud Foundry shops actually run at, why an agent-driven SDLC is an argument for a PaaS rather than against one, and how to keep marketing a platform internally once it has gone invisible from working so well.
Slides
Abstract
Each year I encounter the same question: how do we convince people to keep using Cloud Foundry? The Cloud Foundry platforms have been running fine for a decade or more, the application developers are happy, and yet there is a constant pull to new platforms. Let's talk about how we can show people that Cloud Foundry has long since solved their platform needs, manage the ongoing internal community marketing, and show the organization that Cloud Foundry is, indeed, worth sticking with. In this talk, I'll go over what has worked and not worked in our community to accomplish these goals.
Further Resources
- TryTanzu.ai - 90-day trial
- "Three Cloud Foundry Stories," Coté, Cloud Foundry Day EU, October 2025 - the four customer stories this talk draws its numbers from.
- "Enterprise Grade Platform Engineering at Charles Schwab," Coté, September 2024 - write-up of Schwab's Explore 2024 panel.
- CNCF Platform Engineering Maturity Model, 2023 - the maturity model the "starting over again" slide uses.
- Platform Engineering, Camille Fournier and Ian Nowland, O'Reilly, 2024 - source of the three-to-five-year rearchitecture figure.
- "Common platform team mistakes and how to avoid them," Camille Fournier, PlatformCon 2025.
- CNCF Annual Cloud Native Survey - the 2023, 2024 and 2025 editions are behind the platform-adoption chart.