A Defining Component of SUSE Cloud Application Platform

Streamlining and automating application lifecycle management, Cloud Foundry takes your raw application code and, with a single cf push command, turns it into a containerized, deployed, and automatically managed application.

• Abstracts Away Container-Level Details: With Cloud Foundry, there is no need to build and maintain container images. Sure, you can build, distribute, and manage container images yourself if you want to, but you’ll save time by letting Cloud Foundry do it for you. Cloud Foundry automatically identifies and pulls in the language libraries and other dependencies your application requires, adds your application code, and deploys the fully assembled and configured application into a production-grade, SUSE Linux Enterprise container.

• Separate Concerns: Using a structured approach that separates code, language, and operating system level concerns, Cloud Foundry makes it easy to maintain application containers over time. Let your developers focus on maintaining application code, while the ops team takes care of operating system updates and keeping language libraries current. Changes to any of these areas can be implemented independently, and are propagated automatically across other containers that share the same dependencies, adding up to more time savings with every update you make.

• Builds Containers Just-in-Time: Cloud Foundry combines the container build and run actions into a single deployment step, and does not depend on pre-defined container images, which can get out of date if not carefully managed. With Cloud Foundry your containers are automatically kept current and you will not accumulate stale images.

• Brokers Third-Party Service Connectivity: Connecting your applications to third-party services is easy using built-in service brokers, and flexible with support for custom brokers that you may wish to add. Service brokers provide you with easy access to data and application services, enabling you to create and bind services to your applications with a simple command. Cloud Foundry creates instances of the services your code needs, sets up network connections from your containers, and provides credentials to your application.

• Automates Application Lifecycle Management: Cloud Foundry also automates operation management across your application’s complete lifecycle. It automatically places your application containers onto appropriate resources, manages their network connectivity and routing needs, handles load balancing and scaling, provides built-in health monitoring and logging, supports rolling application updates, and more—all triggered by your simple cf push command!

Cloud Foundry also provides the vital controls you need to secure access to the platform, including applications and services hosted on it. Designed for enterprise use, Cloud Foundry can be integrated with your identity management system and configured to manage users and organizations with fine-grained, role-based access control.