Cloud Foundry: Infrastructure Options
The Cloud Foundry PaaS provides users a choice of deployment clouds, development frameworks, and application services along with the opportunity to customize and extend existing platform offerings. From the article, find out what the infrastructure options for Cloud Foundry are and what the mechanism enabling communication between the PaaS and different infrastructure types is.
Infrastructure
Cloud Foundry is an infrastructure-agnostic PaaS solution that can be deployed on:
- an IaaS
- a virtualization platform
- a local machine
Hybrid and multi-cloud models are also possible with Cloud Foundry.
BOSH: deployment and orchestration
Using BOSH as a tool chain for Cloud Foundry deployment and management is a method maintained by the Cloud Foundry community. The tool takes responsibility for communication with infrastructure APIs to orchestrate the life cycle of large-scale distributed systems.
BOSH Lite enables running a Cloud Foundry instance on a single machine. Implemented as a Vagrant box with containers to emulate VMs, a local BOSH environment allows experimenting with the platform without the need to configure an IaaS.
Head to the project website to learn more.
BOSH CPIs
BOSH interacts with an infrastructure layer through its Cloud Provider Interface (CPI) component. In this communication process, each CPI is responsible for a specific provider.
The tool chain architecture allows extending the pool of existing CPIs to add BOSH support for more infrastructure offerings.
BOSH CPIs are available for:
*On November 2, 2015, the Microsoft team announced the general availability of Cloud Foundry on Azure.
BOSH CPIs are also being developed for Google Compute Engine, SoftLayer, and some others. For information on how to use BOSH and CPIs to deploy and manage Cloud Foundry, refer to BOSH Documentation.
Hardware requirements
Resources needed for Cloud Foundry clusters depend on many factors, including the complexity of deployment, infrastructure type, and so on. In the table below, find the minimum hardware requirements for deploying the PaaS on vSphere.
| CPU | RAM | Disk | NIC | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Minimum hardware requirements | 2 physical cores | 48 GiB | 500 GB | 1 |
| Recommended hardware configuration for a CF POC | 8 physical cores | 128 GiB | 1 TB | 2 |
The variety of BOSH CPIs gives Cloud Foundry users the freedom to choose their infrastructure and work with private, public, and hybrid/multi- cloud scenarios as well as local instances.
If BOSH does not currently support a preferred infrastructure provider, creating a new CPI is the way to go.
BOSH Documentation gives a general idea of how to build a CPI. The following articles might also help in adding a cloud provider to the list of existing offerings:
Related readings
- Cloud Foundry on OpenStack: Why Use Them Together?
- Cloud Foundry on OpenStack at IBM
- Cloud Foundry on Microsoft Azure: An Overview
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