Cloud Foundry: The Definitive Guide

Foreword

When we think of transformative innovation, it’s easy for our minds to grasp the tangible and overt technologies—the television, the personal computer, the smartphone. These inventions are visible, material commodities that serve a physical purpose in our lives. These technologies start small and then eventually gain widespread adoption, at which point they change the way we interact and engage with the technology—and often with the world around us. When we talk about strides in technology to most people, these are the gadgets they envision: separate objects that can be picked up, plugged in, and turned off.

But for those of us who are quietly enabling digital transformation across multiple industries, we know what innovation can look like. It can be invisible and intangible—the velocity behind a high dive into the pool. The operators and developers of the world no longer reside in the technology aisle. You are leading the change at every kind of company across every industry. It’s one thing to demonstrate how a printing press increases the pace of printing papers exponentially. It’s another thing entirely to explain how a platform that is not visible has the ability to transform a company’s ability to compete in a quickly changing marketplace. This book is a resource for you as you lead the digital revolution within your organization.

This is undoubtedly a technical book devoted to the underlying concepts of Cloud Foundry and how it works, but it is emblematic of something larger at play. The author, Duncan Winn, has spent a career helping customers achieve more with technology. Most recently, at Pivotal, he helped customers implement, deploy, and get apps up and running on Cloud Foundry. He saw such incredible results that he took it upon himself to begin the project of cataloging, explaining, and evangelizing the technology. Duncan saw the monumental benefit of Cloud Foundry to everyone, from the business itself right down to the developer. He saw how cloud-native application, architecture, and development are driving and accelerating digital innovation, and that Cloud Foundry was the invisible platform that could take this process from days to minutes.

Cloud Foundry is dedicated to improving the ability of developers to code and deploy new applications. The collaborative nature of this open source project facilitates cooperative, interactive creation, driving innovation. A platform that expedites the deployment of applications does so with the understanding that an iterative approach to development enables a user-first mentality. Cloud Foundry’s support of continuous delivery empowers developers to iterate applications based on user feedback, eliminating the need for late-night adjustments during limited change windows. It minimizes risk around release failure because incremental change is easier to perform and less drastic. In short, Cloud Foundry makes a developer’s job faster and easier.

Cloud Foundry is the standard for application platforms with the noble vision of unifying the market for enterprise software. Cloud Foundry: The Definitive Guide is an integral rulebook for building the software of the future and maintaining the momentum of digital transformation across industries. The power of open source is self-evident in the potency of Cloud Foundry, with a commitment to sharing and continuous innovation.

It is my hope that you use this book as your digital transformation encyclopedia. Read it, revisit it, learn from it, and challenge it. Cloud Foundry is for you.

Abby Kearns

Executive Director of
Cloud Foundry Foundation