Overview of Cloud Foundry

Cloud Foundry (CF) is an industry-standard PaaS, a platform for developing cloud-native applications. It is an open source platform (https://github.com/cloudfoundry), originally developed by VMware and now owned by Pivotal Software, a joint venture by EMC, VMware and General Electric (GE). You can deploy it and run your apps on your own computing infrastructure, or deploy it on an IaaS, such as AWS, vSphere, or OpenStack. The Cloud Foundry PaaS is available from a commercial CF cloud provider (https://www.cloudfoundry.org/learn/certified-providers/), such as GE Predix, or Pivotal Cloud Foundry, or IBM Bluemix, or you can deploy the platform at scale on top of a cloud provider. A broad community (https://www.cloudfoundry.org/community/) contributes to and supports Cloud Foundry. GE's Predix leverages Cloud Foundry and so does IBM's Bluemix. The platform's openness and infrastructure agnostic support prevent its users from being locked into a single cloud provider or framework, or set of app services. An overview of the key architecture and components of Cloud Foundry is given in the following diagram:

Cloud Foundry was primarily written in the Go language. The platform's openness and extensibility prevent its users from being locked into a single framework, set of application services, or cloud. Cloud Foundry is ideal for IoT application development because developers can deploy their applications to Cloud Foundry using their existing tools and with zero modification to their code.