Cloud Foundry: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 2. Concepts

This chapter explains the core concepts underpinning Cloud Foundry. Understanding these concepts paints a complete picture of why and how you should use the platform. These concepts include the need to deal with undifferentiated heavy lifting and why cloud-based operating systems are essential in protecting your cloud investment. This chapter also touches on the philosophical perspectives behind Cloud Foundry with its opinionated do more approach. Operational aspects, including release engineering through BOSH, and built-in resilience and fault tolerance are also introduced. Finally, some of the core capabilities of the platform beyond container orchestration are introduced, including the aggregated streaming of logs and metrics and the user access and authentication (UAA) management.

Undifferentiated Heavy Lifting

Cloud Foundry is a platform for running applications and one-off tasks. The essence of Cloud Foundry is to provide companies with the speed, simplicity, and control they need to develop and deploy applications. It achieves this by undertaking many of the burdensome boilerplate responsibilities associated with delivering software. These types of responsibilities are referred to as undifferentiated heavy lifting, tasks that must be done—for example, container orchestration or application placement—but that are not directly related to the development of revenue-generating software. The following are some examples of undifferentiated heavy lifting: ...