Open Source For You — December 2017

http://www.OpenSourceForU.com | OPEN SOURCE FOR YOU | DECEMBER 2017 | 89

Let's Try Developers

C

loud Foundry is an open source, Platform as a Service

(PaaS) offering, governed by the Cloud Foundry

Foundation. You can deploy it on AWS, Azure, GCP,

vSphere or your own computing infrastructure.

The different landscapes for applications

Let’s take a step back and quickly check out all the landscapes

for applications. If you want an application to cater to one of

your needs, there are several ways of getting it to do so.

1. Traditional IT: In a traditional landscape, you can procure
   your infrastructure, manage all the servers, handle the data
   and build applications on top of it. This gives you the most
   control, but also adds operational complexity and cost.


2. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): In this case, you can
   buy or lease the infrastructure from a service provider,
   install your own operating system, programming runtimes,
   databases, etc, and build your custom applications on top
   of it. Examples include AWS, Azure, etc.


3. Platform as a Service (PaaS): With this, you get a
   complete platform from the service provider, with the
   hardware, operating system, and runtimes managed by the
   service provider --you can build applications on top of it.
   Examples include Cloud Foundry, OpenShift, etc.


4. Software as a Service (SaaS): Here, the service provider has
   already a pre-built application running on the cloud —if it suits
   your needs, you just get a subscription and use it. There might
   be a pre-existing application to meet your needs but if there
   isn’t, this offering provides very little room for customisation.
   Examples include Gmail, Salesforce, etc.

Cloud Foundry is an industry standard cloud application platform.

Developers can use it to build apps without having to worry about the nitty

gritty of hardware and software maintenance. By focusing solely on the

application, they can be more productive.

Why opt for a PaaS offering like Cloud Foundry?

Choosing a PaaS offering has multiple benefits. It

abstracts away the hardware and infrastructure details

so your workforce can concentrate more on application

development, and you require very few operations to be

managed by the IT team. This leads to faster turnaround

times for your applications and better cost optimisation. It

also helps in rapid prototyping as you have the platform

taken care of; so you can build prototypes around your

business problems more rapidly.

Cloud Foundry: A brief description

Cloud Foundry is multi-cloud, open source software that can

be hosted on AWS, Azure, GCP or your own stack. Since

Cloud Foundry is open source, you get application portability

out-of-the-box, i.e., you are not locked in to a vendor. You

can build your apps on it and move them across any of the

Cloud Foundry providers.

The Cloud Foundry project is managed by the Cloud

Foundry Foundation, whose mission is to establish and

sustain the development of the platform and to provide

continuous innovation and value to the users and operators

of Cloud Foundry. The members of the Cloud Foundry

Foundation include Cisco, Dell, EMC, GE, Google, IBM,

Microsoft, Pivotal, SAP, SUSE and VMware.

From a developer’s point of view, Cloud Foundry has

support for buildpacks and services. Buildpacks provide

the framework and runtime support for apps. Typically,

they examine your apps to determine what dependencies