Cloud Foundry: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 12. BOSH Deployments

This chapter provides a brief overview of BOSH deployments, including Cloud Foundry’s deployment manifest. BOSH deploys software to infrastructure (often an IaaS layer) using a deployment manifest, one or more stemcells, and one or more releases.

As described in Chapter 11, releases exist to package of all your required artifacts. Releases are then deployed to one or more machines (often VMs) known as instance groups, via a deployment manifest. A deployment manifest describes how to install releases. It defines how the various processes (release jobs) that have been packaged by releases should be distributed and deployed to various instance groups.

There is no direct correlation of release contents and what process runs on an instance group. This correlation is explicitly defined in the deployment manifest. Releases are always IaaS-agnostic. A release coupled with a deployment manifest can also be IaaS-agnostic if written correctly. As of this writing, only stemcells remain explicitly IaaS format–specific. IaaS format–specific means that certain stemcells can be reused across the same IaaS format; for example, OpenStack stemcells can be reused for RackHD, and vSphere stemcells can be reused for vCloudDirector and VirtualBox. However, where the IaaS format differs, such as between GCP and AWS, separate stemcells that are specific to each IaaS format are required.

YAML Files

Both BOSH and Cloud Foundry make extensive use of YAML files. This includes ...