Cloud Foundry: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 1. The Cloud-Native Platform

Cloud Foundry is a platform for running applications, tasks, and services. Its purpose is to change the way applications, tasks, and services are deployed and run by significantly reducing the develop-to-deployment cycle time.

As a cloud-native platform, Cloud Foundry directly uses cloud-based infrastructure so that applications running on the platform can be infrastructure unaware. Cloud Foundry provides a contract between itself and your cloud-native apps to run them predictably and reliably, even in the face of unreliable infrastructure.

If you need a brief summary of the benefits of the Cloud Foundry platform, this chapter is for you. Otherwise, feel free to jump ahead to Chapter 2.

Why You Need a Cloud-Native Platform

To understand the business reasons for using Cloud Foundry, I suggest that you begin by reading Cloud Foundry: The Cloud-Native Platform, which discusses the value of Cloud Foundry and explores its overall purpose from a business perspective.

Cloud Foundry is an “opinionated” (more on this later in the chapter), structured platform that imposes a strict contract between the following:

• The infrastructure layer underpinning it

• The applications and services it supports

Cloud-native platforms do far more than provide developers self-service resources through abstracting infrastructure. Chapter 2 discusses at length their inbuilt features, such as resiliency, log aggregation, user management, and security. Figure 1-1