Likelihood to Recommend 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. Read full review I would only get into it if I where willing to pay for the support plan and getting some assurances from the team as to where they are headed. The platform itself is great and can save you a ton of hard work and money. but it's hard to be confidant in it's sustainability.
Read full review Pros 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 Read full review Hosting of serverless application Hosting of load balancer Hosting of virtual appliances Read full review Cons 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. Read full review The company has not been very communicative as of lately. Not much news, no apparent work on missing features. Some components are incomplete as far as some critical features. For example, I use RethinkDB as my database and it's missing critical features like backup and clustering, so It is unusable and they should have made that clear from the get go. The pricing on the support plan is vague. I do have the feeling it is actually well worth the money, but it's hard to form a decisions based without more predictable specific. Seems to me like the platform's future is unclear. Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review It can help you to host your virtual appliance or serverless application at very low cost. DigitalOcean marketplace also helps you to deploy the serverless app or virtual appliance effortlessly. It is suitable for small scale deployment and the process to setup an account and roll out your app via marketplace is easy and cheap.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review The platform is saving me a lot of time I would have been wasting on operations instead of development. The platform is saving me a lot of money as I can easily switch between cloud providers to find the best price. I am worried though for the price I might have to pay in case of an unexpected system issue. Hopefully I will be able to pay the support plan before that. Read full review ScreenShots