Best PaaS with rich CLI, thats makes devops a breeze.
Rating: 10 out of 10
IncentivizedUse Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
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
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.
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.
- The applications needs security configuration within the same CloudFoundry instance.
- The organization, for whatever reason does not want developers to manage the instances.
AP
Anudeep Palanki
Application Developer in Information Technology at Monsanto Company (10,001+ employees)
Vetted Review
3 years of experience