Cloud Foundry: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 10. BOSH Concepts

BOSH is a release-engineering tool chain that provides an easy mechanism to version, package, and deploy software. It makes it possible for you to create software deployments that are both reproducible and scalable. This chapter covers BOSH concepts and primitives.

BOSH is an open source project originally developed to deploy Cloud Foundry. It is often overlooked as just another component of Cloud Foundry, but the truth is that BOSH is the bedrock of Cloud Foundry and an amazing piece of the ecosystem.

BOSH is a recursive acronym that stands for BOSH outer shell. The outer shell refers to BOSH being a release tool chain that unifies release-engineering, deployment, and life-cycle management of cloud-based software. To put it simply, the BOSH outer shell runs Cloud Foundry so that Cloud Foundry can run your apps.

Note

For readability I talk about BOSH deploying to VMs as simply machines; as is typically the case, however, BOSH can actually deploy VMs, containers, and in some cases, you can use it to configure physical servers.

BOSH can provision and deploy software packages either onto a single machine or at scale over hundreds of machines, with minimal configuration changes. It also performs monitoring, failure recovery, and software updates with zero-to-minimal downtime.

Release Engineering

IT operations are tasked with achieving operational stability. Historically, operational stability was achieved by reducing risk through limiting change. Limiting ...