3

I have a MEAN stack application which needs to be cloud hosted. The management needs it to be portable and that brought me to checkout cloud foundry. However, even for cloud foundry there are many provider options like CF on Azure, PCF , IBM Blue Mix and so on. However, I am not able to understand the differences between them. Can you please point me to something that helps me understand the differences between these various providers and make a decision? Also whats the difference between Azure PaaS and Azure Cloud Foundry?

shmit
  • 2,306
  • 2
  • 16
  • 20
  • 1
    I can’t speak to Azure of PCF, but I know that IBM Cloud (previously bluemix) is a one stop for hosting a MEAN stack, complete with a huge source of devOps, monitoring and API management tools that can be spun up with the push of a button. I work there, but from a developer perspective I can objectively say it’s an SDE’s paradise. – John R Feb 03 '18 at 00:54
  • 1
    If you’re interested in hearing more, I can connect you with a developer advocate to answer your questions. – John R Feb 03 '18 at 00:58
  • Thanks John. Can you please connect me to the dev advocate? That would be really helpful. – shmit Feb 04 '18 at 02:46

2 Answers2

4

Cloud Foundry is an open source PaaS and because it's open source, you have the freedom to either:

  1. host it yourself on a variety of IaaS
  2. use a public, multi-tenant Cloud Foundry service
  3. have a provider host a private CF for you

This is very similar to hosting options for Kubernetes for example (even though it's worth mentioning that Cloud Foundry predates Kubernetes by a couple of years).

"Pivotal Cloud Foundry" is a commercial distribution of Cloud Foundry targeted at large enterprises. It has a couple of features not found in the open source version, mostly related to deployment automation and integration of application services like MySQL etc. Pivotal is also a main sponsor of development work on the open source version of Cloud Foundry. PCF on Azure is kind of a "template service" that allows you to quickly deploy a private PCF installation on Azure, so it's to some degree a combination of hosting options 1) and 3).

You specifically asked about the difference between various public Cloud Foundry service providers. Here's the most important points:

  • data center location and related privacy concerns (PWS runs on AWS US locations for example)
  • choice of managed application services and plans (e.g. MySQL, PostgreSQL etc.)
  • pricing for apps and application services
  • performance (available CPU per Diego Cell on which application containers execute, networking)
  • Cloud Foundry version and supported features like container-to-container networking or deployment of docker containers
  • quality and availability of support options, onboarding assistance
  • availability of legal assurances/contracts you may need, e.g. to comply with EU GDPR rules

Also worth reading: Cloud Foundry explained

Johannes Rudolph
  • 35,298
  • 14
  • 114
  • 172
2

Cloud Foundry is an OpenSource PaaS that can run on top of any different IaaS. So you can got to https://github.com/cloudfoundry/cf-deployment and use it to install your own instance of Cloud Foundry on Azure, AWS, GCP, vSphere, OpenStack, SoftLayer ... etc.

PCF is a commercial product from Pivotal based on the OpenSource Cloud Foundry. You buy it and then you install and run it on an IaaS of your choice.

BlueMix is a commercial product from IBM which is also based on OpenSource Cloud Foundry. It is also a set of services based on various IBM products so with BlueMix IBM runs and manages the cloud for you.

Azure PaaS is a set of service from Microsoft for deploying applications which only runs an Azure, while Cloud Foundry can be installed on Azure or other IaaS providers.

ams
  • 60,316
  • 68
  • 200
  • 288
  • Thanks for your response. Does implementing CloudFoundy mean that I can deploy my application on Azure Cloud foundry today and port it as-is to another cloud foundry provider like BlueMix? – shmit Feb 04 '18 at 02:48
  • 1
    To clarify, there are public and private Cloud Foundry providers. IBM BlueMix is a public provider, but there are several others like Pivotal Web Services, Swisscom & AnyNines. A private provider would generally be yourself (i.e. self-hosted), as mentioned above, but could also be a managed offering where another company operates CF for you. If you're a developer, this is unnecessary detail though. All you need to know is that you can deploy your app to *any* of these providers, switch providers or even use multiple using the same standard tools & process. – Daniel Mikusa Feb 04 '18 at 14:11