Cloud Foundry explained

Question

So I\'ve been reading up on Cloud Foundry and yet I\'m still confused as to what it is. Here is my take anyway on PaaS on CF, and hopefully you guys could tell me if I\'m wrong

Answer 1

I'm a Developer Advocate for Cloud Foundry and want to add a little to Mark's answer to focus on some of the other details you mentioned in your original question.

Firstly, you mention GAE and Azure. Both of these have certain limitations - GAE limits you to specific languages and APIs, for example. Neither are Open Source. CF is extensible (the new version has buildpack support for example, enabling you to choose "any" language runtime), and you can choose to run it where you want.

Mark mentions 4 IaaS providers we can run CF on today, but assuming that the IaaS in question (let's say we include Azure, CloudStack, Google Compute Engine etc as future targets) can support a small number of what we call Cloud Provider Interfaces (CPIs) then you can deploy Cloud Foundry onto those infrastructures too.

You ask how it is possible to use services from different providers. Like Heroku, the forthcoming version of Cloud Foundry (.com) will support a "marketplace" where you can plugin functions from additional vendors, and if you are running your own Cloud Foundry instance you can choose which services to deploy and connect to your apps.

It's pretty cool :-) come talk to us on the mailing list if you want to know more!