Interview with Cloud Foundry CEO Sam Ramji
Swapnil Bhartiya: Can you tell us what Cloud Foundry is and how it is different from the traditional server virtualization space?
Sam Ramji: Cloud Foundry is a cloud native application platform. In the past, when people talked about Platform as a Service (PaaS), they talked about Amazon Web Services as Infrastructure as a Service and Heroku as Platform as a Service. With AWS, you get the ability to use an API to get more compute, networking, storage, etc. It abstracts – not virtualizes – but abstracts your infrastructure.
Back in 2007, a few people from Heroku said "what if instead of having to know that you are deploying these servers, you would just write a little bit of Ruby code and then you say 'git push heroku master'." You are just connecting your source control system with the bit of code that you need for a system that will take all those dependencies, combine them dynamically, put them on the right number of servers, scale it up/scale it down based on demand, attach to storage, detach from storage; that's what the platform layer is supposed to do.
Fast forward to 2015, and we have so many different clouds; people are using the term even for on-premises solutions. If you take things like OpenStack or VMware or bare metal provisioning, "cloud" really points at "elastic capability for infrastructure." So, on top of the elastic capability for infrastructure, now you need something that can be deployed across all those clouds to build cloud native applications. That's what Cloud Foundry does.
Another big aspect of cloud native-ity is bits of these code being small and portable, which leads to microservices. If we shrink all these pieces of code, if we right-size them, then we can iterate them much faster. Maybe we can update our code several times a day based on new insights. We create a platform which basically enforces a set of opinions to
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