Best PaaS with rich CLI, thats makes devops a breeze.
Rating: 10 out of 10
February 14, 2018
AP
Vetted Review
Verified User
3 years of experience
CloudFoundry is a Platform as a Service product that's used widely in our organization. It's run on a large EC2 instance and is maintained by dedicated teams within our organization. It solves several problems particularly well, it provides an virtual run time environment for each deployable, supports deployable in various languages thanks to build packs, makes horizontal scaling a breeze.
- 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
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.
73.75%
7.4
- 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.
- Docker and Heroku
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.
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.