Cloud Foundry

Chapter 3. Cloud-Native Platforms

“Cloud Foundry is so resilient that the reliability of the underlying infrastructure becomes inconsequential.”

Julian Fischer, anynines

The previous chapter explored the current technical driving forces impacting software development and delivery. This chapter explores the key concepts that underpin the Cloud Foundry platform and how it is uniquely positioned to leverage the technical driving forces discussed in the previous chapter.

You Need a Cloud-Native Platform, Not a PaaS

Cloud Foundry is a cloud-native platform offering features that can be consumed “as a service.” Historically, it has been referred to as a platform as a service (PaaS).

Legacy PaaS

PaaS has been around in various forms for some time; but compared to the IaaS or SaaS layers, PaaS is not well understood because it is an overloaded and ambiguous acronym causing confusion. Everything from configuration-management solutions and middleware-provisioning systems to container-management and orchestration tools have, at some point, all been referred to as a PaaS. Early versions of PaaS struggled to gain broad market adoption because of:

• Limitations around visibility into the platform

• Lack of integration points to extend the platform

• Limited or single language / framework support

• Lock-in concern (due to no open source ecosystem) with a lack of non-public cloud options

The additional challenge with the term PaaS is that the boundaries between SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS are ...