Let's start with early days of application development and deployment. Initially in traditional IT to deploy an application after development, below steps are required:
- Provision a VM
- Configuring Networks
- Configuring runtime for application on VMs
- Connecting to all type of sources (Database, Third party systems)
When cloud computing comes into picture, this scenario changed and we have IaaS (Infrastructure as Service), which ease work of the configuring the VM and network, and give freedom developers to just take care Runtime, Application, Data and Services to deploy. Still it has a lot of stack to take care by developer to provision the application to customer.
To solve all these problems it comes to Cloud Native Platform, where the developer need to focus on application and data, which matters most to business and leave rest of things to IaaS and Pivotal Cloud Foundry(PaaS). Below image gives more clarity for the same:
Cloud foundry is an open source project which provides the PaaS capability, and PCF provides some additional products OSS for the cloud foundry.
PCF uses some terminologies which need to be understand. I will list some of one liner terminologies here with reference to detailed explanation link wherever applicable.
1. Org : An organization is the unit of tenancy in Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Within an enterprise there are typically many lines of business. These map to Orgs within Pivotal Cloud Foundry.
2. Spaces: Spaces are used to group applications and services. Spaces are generally created according to a project’s delivery environments (e.g. test, qa, staging, production).
To perform the hands on over the PCF we need to setup the PCF runtime or use PCF Webservices.
- To setup the PCF at local system, download PCF Dev and set it up on your machine.
https://network.pivotal.io/products/pcfdev#/releases/88478 - To setup your PCF Dev and first application refer below link
https://pivotal.io/platform/pcf-tutorials/getting-started-with-pivotal-cloud-foundry-dev/introduction
PCF provides it's runtime for one org and one application almost free. Please refer below link and signup to use PCF runtime. Use below link to register and use runtime
Lesson 1 : Pushing application to PCF
Lesson 2 : PCF Architecture, Logging and High availability
Lesson 3 : Services and Manifests
Lesson 4 : Application Security Groups and Log Drain
Lesson 5 : Blue Green Deployments and Microservices
Lesson 6 : Application Autoscaler, Performance Monitor, and Metrics
Lesson 7 : Buildpack and Service Brokers