The Cloud Foundry-ABC

If you are just about to run your first application in Cloud Foundry, this is the place to start. First of all: Congratulations! Cloud Foundry is a great technology used by developers and it is amazing how it can make your life easier. If you feel like you have been a sys admin, even though you thought of yourself as a developer, I promise, you will love Cloud Foundry. Sys admin time is over, you are finally free to work on your code. Do you think this sounds like Docker or Kubernetes? Wait for it, it can get even easier than this.

In this article, we'll just get you familiar with the most common terms of the Cloud Foundry world. So once we dig deeper, you'll know what we are talking about.

Target

There are multiple public Cloud Foundry installations across the world. meshcloud offers a couple of them within Germany. So once you start working with Cloud Foundry, you will have to define, which of the installations you are communicating to. Each of those installations is called a target. In order to switch locations within the meshcloud Federation, you will also have to switch target.

For example

cf api https://api.cf.eu-de-darz.msh.host

will lead you to our DARZ location in Darmstadt.

CLI

"CLI" stands for command line interface. The Cloud Foundry CLI will help you to interact with Cloud Foundry, to push your applications, scale them, create services and so on. In order to use Cloud Foundry, you will download and install the Cloud Foundry CLI tools first. Once you installed it, you can use your terminal or Powershell to execute functions, which in the background communicate to the Cloud Foundry API via REST calls. Every call you make to a function, simply starts with cf.

Organization

A Cloud Foundry Organization defines a single tenant on the system. So within meshcloud this is one customer account. In order to see the organization that you are currently working with in your terminal just type

cf orgs

and the result will be something like this:

Getting orgs as xyz...

name
meshcloud-demo

Space

Within meshcloud, a Cloud Foundry Space represents a meshcloud project. You may have multiple spaces/projects within your organization. All your applications and service instances will be scoped to a specific space/project. In order to see the spaces/projects you have access to within your organization, you can type:cf spaces

Services

We differentiate applications and services within Cloud Foundry. While you bring the application to the platform. As meshcloud, we offer various stateful services for you to use. Services are offered in the so-called Market Place. To see the market place, just type: cf marketplace and you will see a list of services to choose from. They are mainly databases and message queues. Each service is offered in various plans, that may differ in size or performance. For example there are shared database plans (our "S" plans) and dedicated database plans (our "M" and "L" plans) within meshcloud's Cloud Foundry.

And that's it. That is the basic vocabulary that you should be familiar with, when starting to use Cloud Foundry.