Pivotal Cloud Foundry is based on container or VM

Question

I am starting to learn PCF . Please help me understand if PCF falls under the concept of containerization or virtualization.

Kindly help me with this.

Answer 1

what is PCF: Pivotal Cloud Foundry is a commercial version of Cloud Foundry that is produced by Pivotal. It has commercial features that are added over and above what is available in the open source version of Cloud Foundry. It's PaaS platform i.e. a platform upon which developers can build and deploy applications. It provides you runtime to your applications. You give PCF an application, and the platform does the rest. It does everything from understanding application dependencies to container building and scaling and wiring up networking and routing.

Beauty of PCF is that you need not to worry about the underlying infrastructure and it can be deployed on-premises and on many cloud providers to give enterprises a hybrid and multi-cloud platform. It gives you flexibility and offers a lot of options to develop and run cloud native apps inside any cloud platform.

Category: PCF is one example of an “application” PaaS, also called the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime, and Kubernetes is a “container” PaaS (sometimes called CaaS). PCF is higher level abstraction and Kubernetes is lower level of abstraction in the PaaS world. In simple terms Cloud Foundry can be classified as a tool in the "Platform as a Service" category.

Applications run on PCF are deployed, scaled and maintained by BOSH (PCF’s infrastructure management component). It deploys versioned software and the VM for it to run on and then monitors the application after deployment. It can't be seen purely under containerization or virtualization.

Learning: Pivotal used to provide PWS (Pivotal Web Services) which is a kind of platform available over the internet that you could have explored to learn for free but somehow PWS took its final bow and left the stage back in Jan'21. May be look to go to one of certified providers: https://www.cloudfoundry.org/certified-platforms/

Answer 2

Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) is a Platform as a Service (PaaS). It helps the developer to write the modern microservice based application and consume services from the marketplace. Typically, we should deploy and install PCF on the cloud platforms such as AWS Cloud and Azure Cloud. The deployment is a big process like it requires 20+ VMs and it should be highly available.

Now coming to your question, PCF doesn't fall specifically under containerization nor virtualization. PCF provides PaaS service like Elastic Bean Stalk in AWS Cloud. Of course, we can use Docker container technology for the application runtime on PCF Cloud.

Answer 3

PCF (a.k.a. PAS, a.k.a. TAS) apps are deployed on containers, typically using Garden as the container runtime and Diego as the container orchestration engine. The components of the PCF runtime may be deployed as virtual machines, managed by BOSH, or as containers.