cf push
That's it. That is the essential answer to the question Why Cloud Foundry?, Anti-climatic, right? At least, until you understand the revolutionary leap that application development has taken as a result.
Without cf push, the typical application development cycle is convoluted and complex because often, much of the development activity is consumed by finding a place for your application to live and serve the world securely, reliably, and robustly. There are three problems that have impeded development:
- It is difficult to deliver applications that are valuable to you, your organization, and/or the world if you aren’t able to focus on building the application itself. In some large organizations, developers have said that 80% of our efforts are getting infrastructure ready. Imagine a day in which you only have to build your application, not assemble middleware; install application runtimes; or fiddle with an operating system (OS), virtual machine (VM), servers, storage, or networking.
- Application developers are not system administrators or system operators, nor should they be compelled to be. If you ask operators to develop code that one would expect from an application developer, most would likely decline. There are boundaries from their perspective. Both disciplines fall under IT, yes. Both are extremely technical roles, requiring deep expertise to be sure. Both do the heavy lifting required to ultimately make an application of some value available to an audience who needs it. However, the Dev versus Ops divide is wide and deep. There are fundamental specializations, concerns, and risks that drive behavior in both roles that creates an obvious and quite natural fracture line to follow when dividing the workload of getting applications up and running in production. Of course, both should work together, share, and learn techniques that are cross-functional and relevant to how to be more efficient and agile in their respective roles, such as continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). In the end, application developers thrive if they focus on developing applications and solving problems in that very difficult space, without the concerns of being a shadow platform engineer or operator.
- It is hard to build a consistent, reliable, secure, and highly available production environment. Much more so by stitching together compute, storage, and network capacity into a cohesive system that meets the demands of modern enterprises and the expectations of application consumers. All the while, providing the rigor and flexibility that enables developers to focus on developing applications with ease. VMware revolutionized the IT world with server virtualization in 1998. They abstracted away the boundaries of physical hardware into pools of virtual servers. This enabled us to make better use of the underlying hardware by distributing and fitting large, complex workloads over the physical boxes.
These are the problems that Cloud Foundry was made to address: ending the eternal battle of the developer's focus on apps versus operating and engineering the platform that those applications are run upon.
Cloud Foundry does this by bringing about enterprise-grade application virtualization. It does this by harnessing and orchestrating a symphony of containers into an elastically scalable distributed system comprising all of the components a given application needs to serve the world. This changes the game much the way VMware did with VMs and server virtualization. Cloud Foundry is a proven application virtualization platform that gives control back to the developer, allowing developers to focus on developing applications, instead of infrastructure operations.
Note
cf push was originally vmc push, which stood for VMware Cloud. Cloud Foundry was conceived at VMware in 2009 and born as an open source project in 2011. The original code for VMC can be found at https://github.com/cloudfoundry-attic/vmc.