Cloud Foundry: What Is It?

If you conduct business over the internet, I’m pretty certain that the word Cloud Foundry has popped up a few times during your virtual voyages. But what is it actually?

Sadly, the internet is not that friendly for ordinary people like you and me. As it is populated and controlled by tech savvy people, they sometime oversee that fact that regular people like you and me also inhabits cyberspace. With this said, allow me to explain to you in layman’s term what Cloud Foundry is, and how it can affect your business.

To sufficiently explain to you everything, I first must give you the bigger picture. So let’s start with;

What is PaaS and SaaS?

PaaS (platform as a software) is a platform that offers you the tools and components in order to create something.

SaaS (service as a software) is an application that is prebuilt and is ready for you to use.

What are public and private clouds?

Public Cloud – a service offered through web services/applications

Private Cloud – managed by an organization and is deployed within their firewall

But then again, there is a third kind of cloud. Called a hybrid cloud, it consists of several external or internal providers. This type of cloud suits enterprises best.

With this said, there are numerous options when developing an application for the cloud. To name a few you have Microsoft Azure, Force.com and of course Google App Engine. These three uses their own development platform meaning customers will not be able to switch from one cloud service provider without rewriting their application code.

Now if the cloud provider you currently have is having issues with their system, then your business will definitely be affected.

Now this is where Cloud Foundry comes in!

To start with, Cloud Foundry is an open source system. This means that it is not dependent to any of the system I mentioned above. Sitting between the layers of different cloud service provider infrastructures, it is a very flexible medium.

Being open source, Cloud Foundry can run on providers that support the application and even if the cloud provider’s virtualization platform itself doesn’t run with VMware’s vSphere (VMware is its developer)

This means that whatever your cloud provider does, your app (which was developed through Cloud Foundry) can easily be moved to another provider without having the need to rewrite it. It’s like flicking the remote from the Discovery Channel to National Geographic.

Cloud Foundry supports Redis, MongoDB, MySQL, with other application services to follow in the coming months. Also supported in its initial release are Node.js, Sinatra and Rails for Ruby and Spring for Java. It also supports JVM based frameworks like Grails.

Business Flexibility!

A successful business knows how to be flexible. It should be able to adapt and quickly go around stumbling blocks which can prevent its growth and success. Having your application tied down to your cloud provider is like having to use snail mail because your email provider’s system is always down.

I have to admit that Cloud Foundry would not dramatically change your business. But it can surely give you an edge over the competition.

Source by Sasha L Alova

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