Cloud Foundry vs Kubernetes

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Cloud Foundry

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Kubernetes

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Cloud Foundry vs Kubernetes: What are the differences?

Comparison between Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes

Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes are both popular container orchestration platforms used for managing and deploying applications. While they have some similarities in terms of functionality, there are key differences that set them apart.

  1. Architecture: Cloud Foundry is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) platform that provides a complete solution for application deployment, while Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform that focuses on managing container workloads. Cloud Foundry abstracts away the infrastructure details and provides a higher level of abstraction, whereas Kubernetes provides more flexibility and control over container runtime and networking configurations.

  2. Working with containers: Cloud Foundry abstracts the concept of containers, allowing developers to push their applications without worrying about containerization. On the other hand, Kubernetes relies heavily on containers and provides advanced features for managing containerized workloads, including scaling, load balancing, and rolling updates.

  3. Scalability and High Availability: Kubernetes offers advanced features for scaling and managing clusters based on demand, allowing for horizontal scaling and highly available deployments. Cloud Foundry also provides scaling capabilities but focuses more on the application level scaling, allowing for autoscaling based on application metrics.

  4. Multi-cloud Support: Kubernetes has a more flexible approach to multi-cloud support and can run on various cloud providers. It allows for hybrid deployments and provides a consistent experience across different platforms. Cloud Foundry, on the other hand, is more tightly integrated with specific cloud platforms, such as VMware's vSphere or Cloud Foundry BOSH, limiting the choice of deployment options.

  5. Ease of Use: Cloud Foundry provides a user-friendly interface and abstracts away the complexities of managing infrastructure and middleware components. It simplifies the deployment process and promotes rapid application development. Kubernetes, while powerful, has a steeper learning curve and requires more technical expertise to set up and manage.

  6. Ecosystem and Integrations: Kubernetes has a vast ecosystem of tools, extensions, and integrations, making it highly extensible and customizable. It offers a wide range of plug-ins and supports various integrations with monitoring, logging, and networking tools. Cloud Foundry also has an ecosystem of tools and services but is more focused on delivering a complete platform experience, with built-in services like databases, messaging queues, and logging.

In Summary, Cloud Foundry is a PaaS platform that offers a higher level of abstraction, easy deployment, and a focus on application-level scaling, while Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform that provides more flexibility, advanced container management features, and multi-cloud support.

Decisions about Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes
Simon Reymann
Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 30 upvotes · 8.9M views

Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

  • GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
  • Respectively Git as revision control system
  • SourceTree as Git GUI
  • Visual Studio Code as IDE
  • CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
  • Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
  • SonarQube as quality gate
  • Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
  • VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
  • Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
  • Heroku for deploying in test environments
  • nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
  • SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
  • Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
  • PostgreSQL as preferred database system
  • Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

  • Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
  • Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
  • Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
  • Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
  • Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
  • Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
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Pros of Cloud Foundry
Pros of Kubernetes
  • 2
    Perfectly aligned with springboot
  • 1
    Free distributed tracing (zipkin)
  • 1
    Application health management
  • 1
    Free service discovery (Eureka)
  • 164
    Leading docker container management solution
  • 128
    Simple and powerful
  • 106
    Open source
  • 76
    Backed by google
  • 58
    The right abstractions
  • 25
    Scale services
  • 20
    Replication controller
  • 11
    Permission managment
  • 9
    Supports autoscaling
  • 8
    Cheap
  • 8
    Simple
  • 6
    Self-healing
  • 5
    No cloud platform lock-in
  • 5
    Promotes modern/good infrascture practice
  • 5
    Open, powerful, stable
  • 5
    Reliable
  • 4
    Scalable
  • 4
    Quick cloud setup
  • 3
    Cloud Agnostic
  • 3
    Captain of Container Ship
  • 3
    A self healing environment with rich metadata
  • 3
    Runs on azure
  • 3
    Backed by Red Hat
  • 3
    Custom and extensibility
  • 2
    Sfg
  • 2
    Gke
  • 2
    Everything of CaaS
  • 2
    Golang
  • 2
    Easy setup
  • 2
    Expandable

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Cons of Cloud Foundry
Cons of Kubernetes
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 16
      Steep learning curve
    • 15
      Poor workflow for development
    • 8
      Orchestrates only infrastructure
    • 4
      High resource requirements for on-prem clusters
    • 2
      Too heavy for simple systems
    • 1
      Additional vendor lock-in (Docker)
    • 1
      More moving parts to secure
    • 1
      Additional Technology Overhead

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    What is Cloud Foundry?

    Cloud Foundry is an open platform as a service (PaaS) that provides a choice of clouds, developer frameworks, and application services. Cloud Foundry makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy, and scale applications.

    What is Kubernetes?

    Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.

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    What companies use Cloud Foundry?
    What companies use Kubernetes?
    See which teams inside your own company are using Cloud Foundry or Kubernetes.
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    What tools integrate with Cloud Foundry?
    What tools integrate with Kubernetes?

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    What are some alternatives to Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes?
    Red Hat OpenShift
    OpenShift is Red Hat's Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications.
    Docker
    The Docker Platform is the industry-leading container platform for continuous, high-velocity innovation, enabling organizations to seamlessly build and share any application — from legacy to what comes next — and securely run them anywhere
    OpenStack
    OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed through a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface.
    Terraform
    With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel.
    Heroku
    Heroku is a cloud application platform – a new way of building and deploying web apps. Heroku lets app developers spend 100% of their time on their application code, not managing servers, deployment, ongoing operations, or scaling.
    See all alternatives