Review: Cloud Foundry brings power and polish to PaaS

Cloud Foundry impresses with broad application support, streamlined deployment, and enterprise extras from Pivotal, though initial setup could be simpler

Contributor, InfoWorld |

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Managing Cloud Foundry clouds isn't hard, but BOSH is a complicated, powerful tool that has a significant learning curve. Administrators accustomed to Puppet and other popular configuration management and orchestration tools won't have any trouble learning BOSH, but they will have to dedicate some time to doing so.

Overall, Cloud Foundry is a strong PaaS in its open source form and in both proprietary forms from Pivotal: online as Pivotal Web Services, and on premises as Pivotal CF. While I haven't evaluated all the proprietary PaaS offerings based on Cloud Foundry by Foundation members, I have looked at Stackato from ActiveState and found that it streamlined a few items not yet cooked in the open source edition, adding value for cloud management and language support.

Cloud Foundry at a glance


Pros	Wide assortment of languages, Web frameworks, and databases available and supported Easy and fast self-service deployment for developers and cloud operators Application container, service, and node health are all monitored and automatically restarted if not in the expected state Big data and mobile services are supported in the PaaS Can deploy from the command line, Eclipse, Spring Tools Suite, Maven, and Gradle
Cons	Automatic horizontal scaling is still in beta, but scheduled for Q3 release in Pivotal CF; another PaaS based on Cloud Foundry, ActiveState's Stackato, already has it No downloadable "micro" VM for Cloud Foundry v2 yet, but you can download Stackato Micro, or use one of two Cloud Foundry installers to install Cloud Foundry in a local VM Limited to applications that run on Ubuntu Linux, unless you use the Uhuru Windows version of Cloud Foundry, which we have not reviewed
Platforms	VMware vSphere, OpenStack, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform
Cost	Cloud Foundry, free open source; Pivotal Web Services, 3 cents per gigabyte per hour after two-month free trial with up to 2GB of app memory and 10 free Marketplace services; Pivotal CF, priced by number of application instances running and number of Operations Manager instances running, with a 90-day evaluation license available for free

This article, "Review: Cloud Foundry brings power and polish to PaaS," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in application development, cloud computing, and open source at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.

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Martin Heller is a contributing editor and reviewer for InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from 1986 to 2010. More recently, he has served as VP of technology and education at Alpha Software and chairman and CEO at Tubifi.

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