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

It is a perfect application when you have multiple users and/or developers and you want to create rules and standards for access and the ability to change access levels. The reporting of usage is good, but adding more granularity into the metrics that have been used to measure are not specific enough. They provide detail but drilling into the detail would be more appropriate i.e. access to the baseline data.

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

• Debug issues
• Monitoring
• allows many services form many different sources

• 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

• Still missing functionalities for a full usage as traffic director.

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

1) One-stop solution for all the complex network connectivity managed by [IBM Cloud Managed Istio]. 2) Nice dashboard to understand the flow. 3) Easy to troubleshoot the service if any one of the APIs is not responding. 4) We can integrate it with Azure Kubernetes service and other cloud provider Kubernetes services. 5) Monitoring the health of the pods can be easily configured and alerts can be triggered very accurately with this tool.

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

• Management burden is reduced resulting in positive ROI.
• Application is being seamlessly instrumented with good impact on business.

Incentivized