Cloud Foundry

Cloud Foundry (PaaS) is available as a stand-alone software package. You can, of course, deploy it on Amazon’s AWS, but you can also host it yourself on your own OpenStack server, or through HP’s Helion or VMware’s vSphere.

First of all, though, to be completely clear, just what is a Cloud Computing platform? There are, broadly speaking, three major categories of Cloud Computing:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), which provides only a base infrastructure, leaving the end user responsible for platform and environment configuration necessary to deploy applications. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are prime examples of IaaS.
• Software as a Service (SaaS) like Gmail or Salesforce.com.
• Platform as a Service (PaaS), which helps to reduce the development overhead (environment configuration) by providing a ready-to-use platform. PaaS services can be hosted on top of infrastructure provided by an IaaS.

Since it’s easy to become a bit confused when thinking about cloud platforms, it’s important to be able to visualize exactly which elements of the compute ecosystem are whose responsibilities. While there is no precise definition, it’s reasonable to say that a platform requires only that you take care of your applications.

With that in mind, the platform layer should be able to provide:

• A suitable environment to run an application.
• Application life cycle management.
• Self-healing capacity.
• Centralized management of applications.
• Distributed environment.
• Easy integration.
• Easy maintenance (upgrades etc).

What is Cloud Foundry

Cloud Foundry is an open source cloud computing platform originally developed in-house at VMware. It is now owned by Pivotal Software, which is a joint venture made up of VMware,  EMC, and General Electric.

Cloud Foundry is optimized to deliver…

• Fast application development and deployment.
• Highly scalable and available architecture.
• DevOps-friendly workflows.
• Reduced chance of human error.
• Multi-tenant compute efficiencies.

Not only can Cloud Foundry lighten developer workloads but, since Cloud Foundry handles so much of an application’s resource management, it can also greatly reduce the overhead burden on your operations team.

Cloud Foundry’s architectural structure includes components and a high-enough level of interoperability to permit…

• Integration with development tools.
• Application deployment.
• Application lifecycle management.
• Integration with various cloud providers.
• Application Execution.

Although Cloud Foundry supports many languages and frameworks, including Java, js, Go, PHP, Python, and Ruby, not all applications will make a good fit. As with all modern software applications, your project should attempt to follow the Twelve-Factor App standards.

Key benefits of Cloud Foundry:

• Application portability.
• Application auto-scaling.
• Centralized platform administration.
• Centralized logging.
• Dynamic routing.
• Application health management.
• Integration with external logging components like Elasticsearch and Logstash.
• Role based access for deployed applications.
• Provision for vertical and horizontal scaling.
• Infrastructure security.
• Support for various IaaS providers.

Getting Started with Cloud Foundry

Before deciding whether Cloud Foundry is for you, you’ll have to try actually deploying a real application. As I already mentioned, to set up a suitable environment, you will need an infrastructure layer. As of now, Cloud Foundry supports AWS, VMware and Open Stack. Setting Cloud Foundry on top of VMware might not be the best choice for us, since we’d probably prefer to avoid the extra complexity. Instead, we’ll work with Pivotal web services (PWS).

PWS provides “Cloud Foundry as a web service,” deployed on top of AWS. You’ll just need create an account and you’ll automatically get a sixty day free trial. Getting started isn’t a big deal at all.