Book Image

Cloud Foundry for Developers

By : Rahul Kumar Jain, Rick Farmer, Wu
Book Image

Cloud Foundry for Developers

By: Rahul Kumar Jain, Rick Farmer, Wu

Overview of this book

Cloud Foundry is the open source platform to deploy, run, and scale applications. Cloud Foundry is growing rapidly and a leading product that provides PaaS (Platform as a Service) capabilities to enterprise, government, and organizations around the globe. Giants like Dell Technologies, GE, IBM, HP and the US government are using Cloud Foundry innovate faster in a rapidly changing world. Cloud Foundry is a developer’s dream. Enabling them to create modern applications that can leverage the latest thinking, techniques and capabilities of the cloud, including: ? DevOps ? Application Virtualization ? Infrastructure agnosticism ? Orchestrated containers ? Automation ? Zero downtime upgrades ? A/B deployment ? Quickly scaling applications out or in This book takes readers on a journey where they will first learn the Cloud Foundry basics, including how to deploy and scale a simple application in seconds. Readers will build their knowledge of how to create highly scalable and resilient cloud-native applications and microservices running on Cloud Foundry. Readers will learn how to integrate their application with services provided by Cloud Foundry and with those external to Cloud Foundry. Readers will learn how to structure their Cloud Foundry environment with orgs and spaces. After that, we’ll discuss aspects of continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), monitoring and logging. Readers will also learn how to enable health checks, troubleshoot and debug applications. By the end of this book, readers will have hands-on experience in performing various deployment and scaling tasks. Additionally, they will have an understanding of what it takes to migrate and develop applications for Cloud Foundry.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

What is PaaS?

Platform as a Service (Paas) is one of a number of terms in the taxonomy of cloud computing including Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) and Software as a Service (Saas).

While, generally, IaaS is server focused and SaaS is user focused, PaaS is developer focused. PaaS enhances developer productivity by enabling application virtualization, so there is a significant reduction in the need for developers to perform the undifferentiated heavy lifting associated with the plumbing that detracts from the actual work on application code and concerns. Often this is called yak shaving. For instance, it may include everything from installing application runtimes, dependencies, app packaging, staging, and deployment, to configuring deeper down the stack into infrastructure concerns such as configuring load balancers, networking, security, provisioning VMs—nearly anything that takes your focus off building a great application.

According to Jeremy H. Brown while at MIT around the year 2000, yak shaving is what you are doing when you're doing some stupid, fiddly little task that bears no obvious relationship to what you're supposed to be working on, but yet a chain of twelve causal relationships links what you're doing to the original meta-task. The term was coined by Carlin Vieri. The original email on the subject can be found at http://projects.csail.mit.edu/gsb/old-archive/gsb-archive/gsb2000-02-11.html.
The logo for the Twelve-Factor App at https://12factor.net  © 2017 Salesforce.com. All Rights Reserved.

Heroku (https://www.heroku.com) is the name of one of the original trailblazers in PaaS. Available since 2007, Heroku is a cloud platform that enables developers to push applications into a hosted service on the internet. The idea was to focus developers on building applications, not infrastructure. Using insights gained by the Heroku team from operating a large platform with diverse applications running on it, Adam Wiggins and team formed the basis for what are now called cloud-native applications through their original Twelve-Factor App (https://12factor.net) patterns. They were motivated to raise awareness of some systemic problems seen in modern application development, to provide a shared vocabulary for discussing those problems, and to offer a set of broad conceptual solutions to those problems with accompanying terminology. We will discuss cloud-native apps, and further developments since the original Twelve-Factor App methodology was written, in future chapters. Additionally, Heroku's buildpack model is used for Cloud Foundry and will also be discussed a bit later in the book.

The Cloud Foundry definition of PaaS

In the cloud era, the application platform is delivered as a service, often described as PaaS. PaaS makes it much easier to deploy, run, and scale applications. Some PaaS offerings have limited language and framework support, do not deliver key application services, or restrict deployment to a single cloud. Cloud Foundry is the industry’s open PaaS and provides a choice of clouds, frameworks, and application services.