Getting Started with Cloud Foundry

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Introduction:

Cloud Foundry has a Container-based architecture, open source cloud application platform. It provides the cloud instances and mainly used to deploy the Application directly into cloud environment. Instead of running the app separately, using the CF CLI(Command Line Interface) tool to deploy , test, configure and manage the apps on CF.

Features of Cloud Foundry:

An open source Cloud Native Platform
Fast and easy to build, test, deploy ,manage& scale apps
Works with any language or framework
Highly adaptable
Can able to see running status of apps
Can scale up or down, debug apps on CF

How to interact with CF?

Command Line Interface (CLI): from terminal / command prompt
IDE plugins

Org and App Space Roles:

CF uses role-based access control, with each role granting permissions in either an organization or an application space.

Organisation :

An Organisation or org represents an organisational account and groups together users, resources, applications, and environments.
Each organisation has a resource quota and it shares the same resource and domain.
Organisations segregate tenants in a Cloud Foundry installation.

To List all orgs that the user has access to the below command can be given in the terminal.

cf orgs

Space:

An organisation have separate spaces for development, staging and production versions of the apps.
A space can also have its own quota.
It has the shared location for developing and running apps
Every application and service is scoped to a space

To List all spaces in the current org

cf spaces

Relationship between org, space and Apps:

org

space

APP

Service
Instance

space

APP

Service
Instance

Before pushing the app into Cloud Foundry, Ensure that:

Log into cloud foundary using cf login command
- cf login -a API-URL
It will prompt for username and password, then give the correct credentials
Select the org and space where the app gets push.
Then push the application using cf push

How to deploy an app into cf?

To deploy an application, need to push its code to the Cloud Foundry instance. The push command is used to push the application on cloud foundary. The arguments may be vary depends on application types. However, it is the best practice to specify all the arguments in a system file called manifest.yml

It provides consistency and reproducibility.An app can specify its service instance dependencies in the manifest.yml file. It will automatically bind to the service instances.

# Start a new app called "myapp"
# If there's a manifest.yml in the current folder,
# the config will be read from there
cf push

Manifest Format

Manifests has written in YAML. The below manifest illustrates some YAML conventions, as follows:

The manifest file begins with three dashes.
The applications block begins with a heading followed by a colon.
The app name is preceded by a single dash and one space.
Subsequent lines in the block are indented two spaces to align with name

Sample manifest.yml

---

applications:

- name: my-app

memory: 512M

instances: 2

buildpack:nodejs_buildpack

Buildpack:

A Cloud Foundry component that resolves app’s runtime dependencies
It provides framework and run time support for applications.
It is used to determine what dependencies to download
It is used to tell how to configure applications to communicate with different services.
It is used to compile or prepare the application for launch.

What happens when push an app using cf push?

Upload: App files sent to CF
Staging:Executable artifact is created (droplet)
Running:App starts on an app host

App receives web requests (if it binds to TCP port)

List of cf commands:

cf commands	Purpose
cf target	Sets or views the targeted organization or space
cf stop	Stops an application
cf start	Start an app
cf set-env	Sets an environment variable for an application(cf set-env var_name var_value)
cf services	Lists all of the services that are available in the current space
cf restart	Stop all instances of the app, then start them again. This causes downtime.
cf restage	Recreate the app’s executable artifact using the latest pushed app files and the latest environment (variables, service bindings, buildpack, stack, etc.). This action will cause app downtime.
cf rename	Rename an app
cf push	Deploys a new application(cf push )
cf marketplace	Lists all of the services that are available in the marketplace.
cf logs	Displays the STDOUT and STDERR log streams of an application.(cf logs
cf login -a	Log in to CF
cf help	show help
cf events	Displays runtime events that are related to an application.(cf events )
cf delete	Deletes an existing application.(cf delete
cf create-space	Creates a space.(cf create-space
cf bind-service	Binds an existing service instance to your application.
cf apps	Lists all of the applications that you deployed in the current space. The status of each application is also displayed.
cf api	To view the current API endpoint
cf -v	Displays the version of the Cloud Foundry command line interface.

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