Review: Cloud Foundry brings power and polish to PaaS

Deploying applications with buildpacks
Buildpacks provide framework and runtime support for your applications. Four buildpacks are standard in Cloud Foundry and Pivotal CF: Java, Node.js, Ruby, and Go. (Stackato has Python instead of Go.) The good news is that buildpacks are readily available, easy to install, and even easy to construct, assuming you can write a few lines of Ruby or another scripting language. In most cases, the open source language and framework you want will be available as a buildpack, and all you'll need to load it will be a mention of the Git repository on the cf command line when you push your app:

$ cf push my-new-app -b git://github.com/johndoe/my-buildpack.git

Alternatively, mention the buildpack in your manifest. For example, a working WordPress for Cloud Foundry is available in this repository created by Daniel Mikusa. To install it, you simply clone the repo, which is not very big; create a MySQL service in your Cloud Foundry instance; edit the manifest and config files on your local machine; and cf push the app. The manifest.yml file looks like this before editing:

---
applications:
- name: mywordpress
  memory: 128M
  instances: 1
  host: mywordpress
  domain: cfapps.io
  path: .
  buildpack: https://github.com/dmikusa-pivotal/cf-php-build-pack.git
  services:
  - mysql-db

As you can guess, the buildpack line in the manifest references the Git repository of a PHP and Apache buildpack.

Cloud Foundry does messaging among the parts of its environment using NATS, a lightweight and distributed publish-subscribe messaging system written in Ruby.

The Cloud Foundry services API defines the contract between the Cloud Controller and the service broker. The broker is expected to implement several HTTP (or HTTPS) endpoints underneath a URI prefix, and it may be load-balanced. User-provided service instances are a mechanism to deliver credentials to applications for service instances that have been pre-provisioned outside of Cloud Foundry -- for example, an Oracle cluster.

Pivotal has a big data product, Pivotal HD, that integrates with Pivotal CF. It includes Hadoop, Pivotal's HAWK SQL query engine for Hadoop, and GemFire XD analytics, as well as the Spring for Apache Hadoop Java framework. The Pivotal Big Data Suite is an enterprise data warehouse that includes unlimited Pivotal HD.