Platform as a Service technology has been around for a number of years. Recent business initiatives have created a need for a solution that can speed delivery of applications. Pivotal Cloud Foundry has seen a growing interest as well as investments. Ford and Microsoft were recently announced as investors. As companies develop their DevOps strategy many of the tools have to be integrated together because they are using multiple tools. With Pivotal Cloud Foundry many of the components are already built into the solution. If you are looking for an example there is an article about AllState and their experience.
In the diagram above you can see there are numerous services also built in the solution. There are also a large number of cloud providers that support Pivotal Cloud Foundry. You also have the ability to run on premise. Recently VMware and Pivotal announced an integrated solution that provides both Pivotal Cloud Foundry and VMware Photon Platform. If your developers are interested in Docker containers there are integrations. I am not going to tell you this is going to solve all of your issues but when it comes to delivering a platform for your developers it is worth researching. Especially if they are considering replatforming an application or developing a new application.
You may have noticed that I referenced Pivotal a lot when referencing Cloud Foundry and that is because Cloud Foundry is open sourced. When you research PaaS you will find that a number of these options actually utilize Cloud Foundry as part of their offering. These vary and some are only hosted so make sure you understand how it is delivered. If you already have developed a service catalog there may be integration that exists, with vRealize Automation there is a solution in the exchange. This way you can provide a single point to deliver all of your offerings.
As with any disruptive technology take the opportunity to learn something new. Solutions like these still require networking, storage and operations teams to support them.
Get started by taking a class or downloading the local version and give it a try. There are a lot of elements in the solution from containers to networking. Don’t forget that you need to review requirements as well before deploying on your existing environment, the requirements might surprise you.
