Cloud Foundry vs Kubernetes

Overview

Cloud Foundry

Stacks188

Followers346

Votes5

Kubernetes

Stacks61.2K

Followers52.8K

Votes685

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.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

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Advice on Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes

Simon

Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH

Apr 27, 2020

Decidedon

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Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

@{GitHub}|tool:27| (incl. @{GitHub Pages}|tool:683|/@{Markdown}|tool:1147| for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
Respectively @{Git}|tool:1046| as revision control system
@{SourceTree}|tool:1599| as @{Git}|tool:1046| GUI
@{Visual Studio Code}|tool:4202| as IDE
@{CircleCI}|tool:190| for continuous integration (automatize development process)
@{Prettier}|tool:7035| / @{TSLint}|tool:5561| / @{ESLint}|tool:3337| as code linter
@{SonarQube}|tool:2638| as quality gate
@{Docker}|tool:586| as container management (incl. @{Docker Compose}|tool:3136| for multi-container application management)
@{VirtualBox}|tool:774| for operating system simulation tests
@{Kubernetes}|tool:1885| as cluster management for docker containers
@{Heroku}|tool:133| for deploying in test environments
@{nginx}|tool:1052| as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
@{SSLMate}|tool:2752| (using @{OpenSSL}|tool:3091|) for certificate management
@{Amazon EC2}|tool:18| (incl. @{Amazon S3}|tool:25|) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
@{PostgreSQL}|tool:1028| as preferred database system
@{Redis}|tool:1031| 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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Detailed Comparison

Cloud Foundry	Kubernetes
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.	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.
Application and services centric lifecycle API;High performance dynamic routing;Buildpack support;Data and web services brokers;Linux Container management;Role Based Access and Teams;Active application health management;Standards based user authentication and authorization;Integrated real time logging API;Multi-provider ecosystem	Lightweight, simple and accessible;Built for a multi-cloud world, public, private or hybrid;Highly modular, designed so that all of its components are easily swappable
Statistics
Stacks 188	Stacks 61.2K
Followers 346	Followers 52.8K
Votes 5	Votes 685
Pros & Cons
Pros 2 Perfectly aligned with springboot 1 Application health management 1 Free service discovery (Eureka) 1 Free distributed tracing (zipkin)	Pros 166 Leading docker container management solution 130 Simple and powerful 108 Open source 76 Backed by google 58 The right abstractions Cons 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
Integrations
VMware vSphere Logentries Amazon EC2 OpenStack Papertrail Amazon VPC Splunk Cloud Sumo Logic	Vagrant Docker Rackspace Cloud Servers Microsoft Azure Google Compute Engine Ansible Google Kubernetes Engine

What are some alternatives to Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes?

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.

Clever Cloud

Clever Cloud is a polyglot cloud application platform. The service helps developers to build applications with many languages and services, with auto-scaling features and a true pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Rancher

Rancher is an open source container management platform that includes full distributions of Kubernetes, Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm, and makes it simple to operate container clusters on any cloud or infrastructure platform.

Google App Engine

Google has a reputation for highly reliable, high performance infrastructure. With App Engine you can take advantage of the 10 years of knowledge Google has in running massively scalable, performance driven systems. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow.

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 Compose

With Compose, you define a multi-container application in a single file, then spin your application up in a single command which does everything that needs to be done to get it running.

Docker Swarm

Swarm serves the standard Docker API, so any tool which already communicates with a Docker daemon can use Swarm to transparently scale to multiple hosts: Dokku, Compose, Krane, Deis, DockerUI, Shipyard, Drone, Jenkins... and, of course, the Docker client itself.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Once you upload your application, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.

Tutum

Tutum lets developers easily manage and run lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers from any application. AWS-like control, Heroku-like ease. The same container that a developer builds and tests on a laptop can run at scale in Tutum.

Render

Render is a unified platform to build and run all your apps and websites with free SSL, a global CDN, private networks and auto deploys from Git.

Related Comparisons

Cloud Foundry vs Kubernetes: What are the differences?

Comparison between Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

Cloud Foundry vs Kubernetes

Overview

Cloud Foundry vs Kubernetes: What are the differences?