CloudFoundry is a free, open source cloud computing platform supported by the non-profit CloudFoundry. It is not tied to any particular cloud service, but can be self-hosted or run on any cloud service preferred.
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Google Cloud Functions
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Google Cloud Functions enables users to run code in the cloud with no servers or containers to manage. Cloud Functions is a scalable, pay-as-you-go functions as a service (FaaS) product to help build and connect event driven services with simple, single purpose code.
Google Cloud Platform Cloud functions are an excellent way to start a serverless journey in GCP, however, using Cloud Run may be the better solution. For users not acquainted with Docker & Linux, I would definitely recommend Google Cloud Functions, however, for more experienced users, Cloud Run may be better suited.
Support for Orgs and Spaces that allow for managing users and deployables within a large organization.
Easy deployment, deploying code is as simple as executing single line from CLI, thanks to build-packs.
Solid and rich CLI, that allows for various operations on the instance.
Isolated Virtual Machines called Droplets, that provide clean run time environment for the code. This used to be a problem with Weblogic and other application servers, where multiple applications are run on the same cluster and they share resources.
SSH capability for the droplet (isolated VM's are called droplets), that allows for real time viewing of the App code while the application is running.
Support for multiple languages, thanks to build-packs.
Support for horizontal scaling, scaling an instance horizontally is a breeze.
Support for configuring environment variable using the service bindings.
Supports memory and disk space limit allocation for individual applications.
Supports API's as well as workers (processes without endpoints)
Supports blue-green deployment with minimal down time
Does not support stateful containers and that would be a nice to have.
Supports showing logs, but does not persist the logs anywhere. This makes relying on Cloud Foundry's logs very unreliable. The logs have to be persisted using other third party tools like Elk and Kibana.
Overall Google Cloud Functions is losing a lot of benefits to other GCP services, making it less attractive to users. A simple example would be the need to zip application files and push them to Google Storage which makes it a bit complicated to automate via a CI/CD pipeline. Another "similar" solution would be using Cloud Run although the need for a docker image is there, with the recent evolutions to Cloud Run (ability to downscale to 0) it makes a lot more interesting.
Documentation is provided and clear for this service. Although GCP support is included in the current contract we didn't get to use it since the process is pretty straightforward.
While Docker shines in providing support for volumes and stateful instances, Cloud foundry shines in providing support for deploying stateless services. Heroku shines in integrating with Git and using commits to git as hooks to trigger deployments right from the command line. But it does not provide on-premise solution that Cloud foundry provides.
Positive impact, since it simplifies the deployment time by a huge margin. Without cloud foundry, deploying a code needs coordination with infrastructure teams, while with cloud foundry, its a simple one line command. This reduces the deployment time from at least few hours to few minutes. Faster deployments promote faster dev cycle iterations.
Code maintenance such as upgrading a Node or Java version is as simple as updating the build-pack. Without cloud foundry, using web logic, the specific version only supports a specific version of Java. So updating the version involves upgrading the version of web logic that needs to involve few teams. So without cloud foundry, it takes at least few days, with cloud foundry, its a matter of few mins.
Overall, happier Developers and thats harder to quantify.
