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Pivotal Cloud Foundry Introduction

Introduction

Enterprises are moving towards a more smooth running IT operations where the maintenance and the management of IT resources are in auto-pilot mode. Mega cloud providers like Amazon, Google, Microsfot and IBM are taking the advantages of this mindset of enterprise architects at a higher cost. These mega clouds has strategies where customers will lock-in to a certain set of technologies and runtimes which will hinder the agility of the overall solutions architecture of your enterprise. Here are some of the drawbacks or challenges with adopting a mega cloud

Because of these challenges, people started to step back and looking for a better alternative to deliver your digital experiences to the customers in a more agile, user friendly manner. One of the popular alternatives to some of the above mentioned challenges is the multi-cloud approach where, using multiple cloud service providers to get the best of all clouds. This approach will address some of the concerns mentioned above. But it will become more and more complex when it comes to maintain. Few drawbacks of multi-cloud approach are

Does that mean cloud is not something we should adhere to? This is where the concept of a private cloud comes into the picture. Most of the time, private cloud is identified as a platform as a service (PaaS) which is running for you. It need not to be a dedicated deployment for you. This is an additional functional layer which sits on top of IaaS layer and control the overall operations within an IT team.

Cloud Foundry is an open source initiave which defines a “Platform as a Service” stack which is independent of any cloud provider. Pivotal has utilized this open source framework and built their own layer of capabilities to the open source version as Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF).

Architecture

The day-to-day IT operations belongs to 3 types of workloads. Those are

Applications contains the business logic of a give service and the runtime defines the technology stack which is used to develop that application. Based on the application domain, a developer can select the best runtime (polyglot programming). Once the application and the runtime is fixed into an artefact as a VM, container image or binary, these needs to be run on top of a computing infrastrutre which is abstracted away by an operating system.

Enterprise Application Workload

Figure 1: Enterprise application workload seggregation

As depicted in the above figure, understanding an enterprise application in the above mentioned 3 aspects allows us to define the processes to manage and maintain each and every aspect independently. That is exactly what Pivotal Cloud Foundry has done with their architecture. They have built a platform with frameworks which can help developers to utilize and automate their development at each layer so that application development becomes a one end-to-end process with well defined set of connected operations. As an example, developer can develop their application with a seletec technology and push that to the PCF platform and from that point onwards, PCF will take care of the rest of the testing, deployment and monitoring of the application.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry High level architecture Figure 2: Pivotal Cloud Foundry High level architecture

At a very high level (33,000 feet), PCF contains the following 3 main components.

Let’s take a bit deeper look into the Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry - detailed look Figure 3: Pivotal Cloud Foundry - detailed look (Source: https://www.slideshare.net/Pivotal/t3-pivotal-cloud-foundry-a-technical-overview)

As depicted in the above figure 3, the PCF platform can be divided into 3 main functional components.

Why Pivotal Cloud Foundry?

Cloud Foundry(CF) is an open source project which is trying to build a vendor neutral, cloud native Platform as a Service (PaaS) framework and it has already achieved the goal to some extent. So what is special about Pivotal version of the Cloud Foundry?

Pivotal has been able to add a value chain on top of the standard CF framework with leading open source software technologies. Some of them are developed and contributed by Pivotal and others are independent vendors. The below figure highlights the difference between the standard CF and PCF.

PCF vs CF Figure 4: PCF vs CF (source: https://docs.pivotal.io/pivotalcf/2-6/concepts/overview.html)

As depicted in the above figure 4, Pivotal has added many additional components which becomes really handy when implementing enterprise level software. The services offerred through pivotal as well as through the partner network allows application developers to make their software enterprise grade with caching, monitoring, security. Additionally, pivotal also provides documentation, training, consultancy, certification to the users who are willing to utlize the PCF platform.

At the end of the day, what pivotal is trying to build is an efficient software delivery pipeline which can be deployed on-premise or cloud which increased the agility, quality and the experience of the developers as well as consumers. There was an analogy somewhere in the internet which compared kubernetes with PCF.

“If K8S is google, PCF is apple ”.