CloudFoundry vs. IBM Cloud Managed Istio

It's well suited if:

• The organization has large number of applications that needs to be deployed frequently.
• The organization is tied to the DevOps mindset.
• The organization has programs in different languages.
• The applications does not need EJB's support that servers like web logic provide.

It's less suited if:

• The applications needs security configuration within the same CloudFoundry instance.
• The organization, for whatever reason does not want developers to manage the instances.

Incentivized

Clearly, the [IBM Cloud Managed Istio] tool is very useful when you have multiple services and each service is connecting with other services through APIs in different networks. To manage this type of complex network, [IBM Cloud Managed Istio] is very useful. It comes with a license that can increase the billing of your project so make sure if your application network mesh, monitoring cannot be managed on your own then you can use it. If your application is not very complex then you have many tools available like Grafana, Prometheus, Sumo Logic, which you can integrate individually with your cluster and implement. In this type of scenario, it is better to not use [IBM Cloud Managed Istio] and it will serve your purpose as well.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Layers transparently onto existing applications
• Allows control of access and rules to be developed
• Creates metrics for usage

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Some more functionalities added could improve it better.
• Better technical user guidance.

Incentivized

Training and usage support available

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• It reduced the complexity of network mesh (ingress/egress services).
• One tool with many solutions. No need to integrate monitoring tools or notification tools.
• It reduced the number of lines of YAML code.
• It reduced the number of labor hours.

Incentivized