Introduction to Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Published by Mukesh Kumar

Cloud Computing Overview

Cloud platform allows us to deploy our application and services and make them available in just a few minutes. When we need to scale an application cloud can easily scale it to handle more traffic in just a few configuration and setup. In short cloud platform enables us to focus exclusively on our application and data without any worry of underlying application infrastructure. There are various models of cloud computing like we have IaaS (Infrastructure As A Service), PaaS (Platform As A Service),SaaS (Software As A Service) etc.

In a traditional on premise application you are responsible to manage your entire infrastructure of an application. You need to manage networking, storage, server,VM, OS, Middleware, Runtime data and application.

If you move to IaaS then you need to choose one of cloud providers like AWS, Azure, GCP or any cloud providers to manage and provision infra for your application.In this cloud providers will manage networking, storage, servers, VM, OS. But still you need to manage middleware, Runtime, data and applications.

If you move to next layer of abstraction that is PaaS then in this case you need to manage only your application and data rest of the things will be managed by platform. PaaS can be hosted on any IaaS of your choice or even you can host it on premise. You can set up PaaS on top of any of the public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, or GCP easily.

In this article i am going to discuss about cloud foundry which is an industry standard open source platform. Most specifically we are going to discuss about Pivotal Cloud Foundry which is one of the top cloud foundry providers. Other cloud foundry providers are IBM Bluemix, SAP Cloud Platform, Atos Canopy, Google’s App Engine and Apache’s Stratos etc. Pivotal cloud foundry adds extra features on top of open source cloud foundry.

Why Pivotal cloud foundry?

When you try to deploy your application to cloud, you'd see that there is a steep learning curve that is required with any of the cloud providers like AWS, or Google Cloud, or Azure.you'd see that there are a lot of concepts that you would need to learn: VPCs, subnets, security groups, virtual machines, virtual servers, and a lot of other concepts. The final goal of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is to acclereate your move to public cloud. So in short you can say here is my source code run it on the cloud for me I do not care how that is the kind of motto of PCF, you give the application to run it would run it on cloud and you don't really need to worry about how we does it.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry is based on cloud foundry. Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) is a cloud-native platform for deploying and operating apps. Cloud Foundry makes the process of building, testing, deploying and scaling applications much easier and faster. The high level architecture of Cloud Foundry is shown below.

In the above picture You can see that CloudFoundry sits in between your applications and your cloud provider. You give the application and it will be deploy it on the cloud provider. You don't really need to worry about all the details. You can set up CloudFoundry on top of any of the public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, or GCP or many others.

For our sample application we will use Pivotal web services for application deployment.We will use website called console.run.pivotal.io which is a installation of Pivotal Cloud Foundry using AWS as the public cloud provider.

As we will deploy a number of applications during this tutorial, you can see we will push our application to Pivotal Cloud Foundry and we don't really need to worry about anything behind the picture. We just need to focus on our applications and what are the services that these applications need.It might need a database, It might need something like a naming server etc.That's the level at which we would need to focus on. What happens behind the scene,how are these deployed,where are these deployed, and all that stuff would be hidden away from us.

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