Cloud Foundry

Chapter 4. Do More

“Here is my source code, run it on the cloud for me. I do not care how!”

Onsi Fakhouri, VP of Engineering of Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Platforms abstract the underlying infrastructure and middleware to offer a rich set of capabilities. These capabilities include providing runtime environments and services for running applications. Deploying and configuring middleware consumes time and prolongs release cycles; platforms remove the requirement for this individualized effort.

A primary goal of Cloud Foundry is to enable the development-to-deployment process to be as fast as possible. However, platform capabilities do not stop here. Platforms are intrinsically about doing more. Specifically, platforms take on more of the mandatory undifferentiated heavy lifting discussed in Chapter 1. This is beneficial; the less you are required to take on, the higher your velocity will be.

This chapter unpacks Cloud Foundry’s capabilities that remove the extraneous and undifferentiated heavy lifting from provisioning infrastructure, runtime environments, applications, and services. The application life cycle may be the same as in the client-server era, but developers can now iterate around that life cycle with velocity, using a self-service model every step of the way.

This chapter explores the following built-in platform capabilities:

• Resiliency and fault tolerance through self-healing and redundancy

• User management

• Security and auditing

• Application life-cycle management, ...