Cloud Foundry: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 11. BOSH Releases

Chapter 10 introduced BOSH concepts on a high level. For operators who want a deeper understanding of BOSH releases, this chapter presents an overview of how releases are structured and packaged.

A BOSH release is your software, including all configuration and dependencies required to build and run your software in a reproducible way. Gaining an understanding of releases will help you to comprehend how individual components work. For example, understanding how a release is composed and deployed can help you to pinpoint where each release job runs. This ability to determine exactly which processes run and where they run is invaluable for debugging.

Release Overview

Releases are self-contained and provide very specific software solely relating to the purpose of that release. Here’s a simple example provided by bosh.io:

[A] Redis release might include startup and shutdown scripts for Redis-server, a tarball with Redis source code obtained from the Redis official website, and a few configuration properties allowing cluster operators to configure that Redis-server.

A release consists of versioned release jobs and packages. A release job describes a single component that can be run in isolation to do its work. A release package contains the required dependencies for a specific job. A release exists as a versioned collection of the following artifacts:

• Configuration properties

• Configuration templates

• Scripts (including startup scripts and shutdown ...