What is the difference between pivotal cloudfoundry and VMWare Tanzu cloudfoundry

Question

Earlier I could able to use Pivotal cloud foundry free subscription to do my poc but now not able to do so and name of cloudfoundry changed to Tanzu.

I would like to understand the timeline history of Cloudfoundry as it keeps changing.

Kindly help.

Answer 1

Regarding the concern on Free Subscription: PWS took its final bow and left the stage back in Jan'21. You are no longer allowed to create org or use PWS anymore. For reference see this article:

https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/pivotal-web-services-blog/pivotal-web-services-end-of-availability-announcement-and-timeline

Cloud Foundry was originally developed by VMware in 2009 and went public in 2011. Somewhere in 2013-14 Pivotal was formed who led the CF into open source era. By end of 2019; VMWare completed the acquisition of Pivotal and named VMware Tanzu..

Below links might be helpful:

https://www.jrebel.com/blog/pivotal-cloud-foundry
https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/14883/385309/from-pivotal-to-vmware-tanzu-what-you-need-to-know

A little more history in general can be found here:

https://developer.ibm.com/blogs/history-cloud-foundry-1/
https://developer.ibm.com/blogs/history-cloud-foundry-2/

Answer 2

A brief summary:

• Pivotal Web Services came out in roughly 2013. It was a public-facing PaaS operated by Pivotal. It ran on AWS & used the opensource Cloud Foundry bits. It had a selection of services available that were powered by App Direct.

• Pivotal Cloud Foundry came out shortly after PWS & was an on-premises version of Cloud Foundry. This was based on the opensource Cloud Foundry but had many things added on top, like a friendly UI over Bosh (Ops Manager), an autoscaler, a scheduler, Apps Manager (similar to the Console on PWS), and many services which you could also install and manage yourself. Over time it came to support multiple IaaS solutions, like vSphere, AWS, GCP & Azure.

• When Pivotal was acquired by VMware at the beginning of 2020, the branding switched so that formerly labeled Pivotal products are now under the Tanzu name. VMware continues to develop this software under the Tanzu brand.

• At the beginning of 20201, PWS was sunset. It's no longer available, but there are other public CF offerings available, some of which offer free trials as well. You can see them on the CF Foundation's website: https://www.cloudfoundry.org/certified-platforms/.

• The Cloud Foundry Foundation continues to publish OSS versions of Cloud Foundry. There is the class version that can be deployed using Bosh on an IaaS (cf-deployment), as well as two newer methods for deploying on Kubernetes (KubeCF & cf-for-k8s).