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Pivotal Cloud Foundry
Pivotal Cloud Foundry
The Cloud Native Platform for the Modern
Enterprise
Introduction
Expanding Internet access and mobile device proliferation are empowering users with increased efficiency and
new and delightful experiences. As a result, software is emerging as a disruptive force in businesses across
every industry. Thus, nimble competitors who judiciously leverage software enabled speed and scale are
increasingly able to secure and retain customers by penetrating traditional barriers of entry or creating entirely
new markets.
Positioned at the confluence of these global trends, software upstarts are redefining norms and disrupting
industries as they rise with unprecedented velocity to global prominence. For example, Uber, Airbnb, Netflix,
Twitter and Etsy have rapidly come to dominate mindshare and market share while attaining multi-billion dollar
valuations. These Silicon Valley “unicorns” notwithstanding, traditional leaders such as Allstate, Ford, Comcast
and Humana across various industry verticals are pursuing digital transformations that leverage software to
redefine their businesses and reshape their industries. Software – the ability to develop, deploy and operate it
with speed and reliability – is steadily becoming the distinguishing characteristic of enterprises able to release
innovative functionality quickly to retain and grow customer bases.
Emergence of Cloud Native Applications
As software organizations navigate their digital transformation journeys, they are being held to higher
standards. They are being asked to enable rapid and iterative software delivery akin to startups while
maintaining global scale, 24/7 availability and highly secure access characteristic of large enterprises. In order
to meet these needs, how software is being developed and operated is being redefined.
Software driven organizations are increasingly developing applications that are “cloud native” - a term used to
describe the set of modern technologies, practices, philosophies and architectural approaches designed for the
cloud era whose collective application enables the development of highly available, constantly evolving
software services designed to run efficiently in the cloud (i.e., “cloud native applications”). For example, cloud
native applications tend to adopt tenets of “12-Factor Apps”, employ flexible architectural principles such as
Microservices, automated and streamlined delivery approaches such as Continuous Integration and
Continuous Delivery, (CI/CD) and collaborative operational and organizational paradigms such as DevOps. As
a result, software driven organizations are able to deliver software that is characterized by its rapid, iterative
cadence of development, elastic cloud scale and enhanced reliability and security.
The Need For A Platform
In many organizations, the approaches employed to build and deploy software rely on manual orchestration of
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low-level steps (e.g. from runbooks), which generate repetitive work that is highly susceptible to errors.
Automation, if applied, is script based and ad hoc. As a result, software processes to build, test, deploy and
operate each application are custom, complex, and frequently inconsistent, often resulting in operational
complexity and chaos. Most organizations manage such complexity by slowing down release processes to
ensure correctness and consistency, and consequently struggle to release new functionality quickly.
A platform can address many of these concerns consistently, across myriad use cases. In a general sense,
building and operating software requires a common set of activities to build, test, deploy, scale, monitor and
otherwise manage cloud scale software. Abstracting, standardizing, automating, and streamlining these
common activities into a general application platform allows software organizations to make many simplifying
assumptions and focus on their business logic that is unique and differentiated. A platform is thus not only cost
effective, but also enables simplicity, consistency and efficiency that promote rapid innovation and competitive
differentiation. In addition to simplify operations for legacy workloads, a platform is especially critical for cloud
native software where the simultaneous application of techniques such as Microservices, DevOps and CI/CD
can amplify operational complexity and manual overhead.
Faced with the choice of investing scarce engineering resources in either developing the platform or building
the applications that will drive core business imperatives, IT leaders are increasingly selecting the latter and
choosing to purchase a platform. A platform investment is not only amortized across multiple applications and
workloads, but also enables business leaders to allocate those resources to revenue generating projects and
avoid the complexity of building and maintaining it.
Key Elements of A Cloud Native Platform
A well-designed platform for cloud native applications embodies key elements that enable enterprises to deliver
software with speed and confidence:
Standardization – The platform provides constructs (e.g. buildpacks, infrastructure automation, service
binding, etc.) that are consistently enforced to yield an operational framework that embodies best practices that
are tested, reproducible, efficient and safe. When shared across projects and teams, they reduce
“undifferentiated heavy lifting” that generally results from custom solutions by each team to address the same
set of challenges. As a result, software driven organizations avoid unanticipated crises and firefighting, and
enhance operational cadence, efficiency and consistency that result in higher customer satisfaction.
Automation & Self-Service – A well-designed platform makes it easy to follow good practices by enabling
(controlled) self-service access to platform functionality and automating standard practices for repetitive tasks.
Self-service reduces waiting time for various activities, e.g. capacity provisioning. Automation yields both
consistency and speed across IT processes and teams, and reduces errors from manual processes. Thus, the
platform further reduces unanticipated problems and supports the evolution of a collaborative culture built
around uniform and efficient processes.
Encapsulation – The platform provides and enforces a simple programming and operating abstraction for the
application (the “application contract”) while hiding the underlying infrastructure complexity. As a result, it
handles crosscutting concerns (e.g., horizontal scaling, high availability and monitoring) uniformly and elegantly
across diverse application use cases. As new technologies emerge, a platform can also not only evolve to
quickly adopt and package emerging technologies (e.g. Docker) into usable constructs that are well integrated
with existing capabilities, but do so without disrupting the existing application contract. Thus, it enables
organizations to continuously benefit from market leading capabilities, with zero additional investment or
operational disruption.
Elevation of Concerns – Through encapsulation, an application platform abstracts and hides infrastructure
details to elevate user attention to higher-level constructs that more directly influence business imperatives. For
example, it frees software organizations from coordinating, configuring and managing VMs, operating systems
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and application servers so they can focus on orchestrating units of business value, e.g. applications, users and
services.
Interoperability & Extensibility – Software organizations are increasingly realizing that while they engage in
common activities to build and deliver software, they must also support the unique business requirements (e.g.
multi-cloud support) and myriad technical contexts (e.g. legacy applications, interoperability with Active
Directory from Microsoft, etc.) of today’s global enterprises. Modern application platforms are based on flexible
frameworks and simple contracts that maintain platform abstractions while still maintaining the ability to
interoperate with the varied technology choices common in enterprises, as well as the ability to elegantly
extend the platform with custom functionality (e.g. support for a new development language).
Enhanced DevOps Collaboration – A modern, cloud native application platform addresses the needs of both
developers and IT operators and enables them to use the same processes, tools and abstractions in a self-
service manner in order to promote a common culture and vocabulary. As a result, the platform facilitates a
collaborative DevOps practice with minimal friction, resulting in greater organizational agility and continuous
delivery.
Pivotal Cloud Foundry Capabilities
Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) is an open source based cloud platform purpose built to accelerate software
delivery. PCF transforms virtual infrastructure into a full-featured, enterprise ready application platform. At its
core, it features a container based, elastic runtime that hosts application instances, and a growing ecosystem
of community, Pivotal and 3rd
party services to facilitate rapid application development. Also, PCF can be easily
deployed to most public or private cloud infrastructures using BOSH for infrastructure configuration and
automation. Finally, IT operators can leverage platform automation for many of their common operational
workflows. Thus, PCF yields the development speed and operational excellence critical for modern enterprises
to remain competitive in the face of global competition.
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The figure above shows salient PCF capabilities, including:
• Polyglot Development – Developers can build and deploy software using Java, .Net, Python, Ruby,
PHP or node.js. The platform can be extended to support new languages and runtimes via buildpacks.
• Multi-cloud Deployment – PCF can be deployed to VMware vSphere, VMware Photon, Openstack,
Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Centurylink Cloud and Cisco Metapod.
• Developer Services – Developers can access a growing ecosystem of enterprise grade application
services to facilitate rapid development for microservices, APIs, applications and other type of software
workloads.
• Elastic Container Runtime – Software is staged, packaged, deployed and scheduled in containers
across the runtime, and can be easily scaled. Docker images can also be deployed and scheduled by
the runtime.
• CI/CD Pipeline – The platform can automate the source code to deployment workflow (e.g., code
checkout, build, packaging, testing and deployment) through native tooling or partner integrations.
• High Availability – The platform provides high availability for both application instances and platform
components through intelligent workload distribution across availability zones, as well as automated
monitoring and recovery capabilities at the process, container and VM levels.
• Zero Downtime Upgrades – PCF can be upgraded without downtime for the applications running on
it. Applications can also be updated via easy blue-green deployment to support A/B testing or
incremental rollout of new features.
• Platform Security - The PCF platform relies on network security, regularly updated hardened OS
images (stemcells), identity & role-based access controls and container isolation to secure both the
platform and the applications it hosts.
