With the announcement of the End of Availability for Pivotal Web Services, where can I migrate my apps?

Products

• Services Suite

Issue/Introduction

On September 17, 2020, VMware announced the plan and timeline for the end of general availability of Pivotal Web Services (i.e. PWS). With this announcement, customers may be wondering about possible migration paths and alternative services. This article will provide some information on that topic for customers.

Resolution

Alternative Cloud Foundry Providers

If you are looking for a service similar to PWS, please take a look at the list of certified Cloud Foundry platforms that is maintained by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. Not all of these companies provide public Cloud Foundry platforms, but some do and most of those offer Free Trials so you can evaluate if the service fits your needs. Please note that VMware is not affiliated with and does not endorse or recommend any of these services.

From a technical standpoint, these certified platform are guaranteed to be compatible with the basic features offered in Cloud Foundry and PWS (which is also certified). In short, you should be able to simply `cf login` to the a different certified provider, target your new org and space and continue deploying apps, consuming services and creating routes in the same way that you have been doing on PWS. Deployment scripts & pipelines you may have created should require very little adjustment to work with any other certified Cloud Foundry platform.

When evaluating new a CF platform providers here are some helpful pointers to consider:

• How do you map a custom DNS name to the provider's platform?
• How does the platform provider handle TLS termination? Does this also support custom domain names?
• What services are offered in the platform provider's Marketplace? All providers will have a marketplace, but the offerings in the marketplace will vary.
• Were you using any VMware Tanzu services provided in the PWS Marketplace? There may not be direct equivalents of these services in other provider's marketplaces as they are VMware specific. For example, Pivotal SSL Service (see the second bullet in this list) or Tanzu Spring Cloud Services.
• Will you need to procure services outside of the platform provider's marketplace? If services are not available in a marketplace, you can always create a service externally (perhaps through some other cloud provider) and wire it in with a user provided service.
• What support options are available when a problem arrives? Is there an SLO/SLA on support requests? Do these meet your needs?

Azure Spring Cloud Services

If you are using Microsoft Azure and running Java/Spring applications on PWS, then you may be interested in the Azure Spring Cloud product. This is not a Cloud Foundry platform, so uses different workflows but will allow you to efficiently deploy your Spring Boot & Steeltoe apps to a production ready Azure managed environment.

You can reference the blog article here regarding the GA of this product which has helpful links for getting started too. You can also reference this introduction blog entry on official the Spring blog.

Other Migration Paths

There are obviously other possible migration paths, like Kubernetes or AWS/GCP/Azure or a VPS provider, but we cannot document them all here and we are covering the options above as we believe they will generally create the least amount of friction for our users. Please make sure to evaluate all of your options carefully, to ensure that they are the best fit for your application and business needs.

Additional Information

Disclaimer

VMware Support cannot recommend specific companies, solutions, alternative service providers or migration path for every PWS customer. Every customer's application and business requirements will differ and so VMware Support encourages every customer to evaluate their own specific needs and plan an appropriate course forward.

The document above recommends some common solutions that we believe will generally help customers. Please evaluate any solution within the context of your application and business requirements.