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> The CloudFoundry installation instructions alone makes me run away screaming. BOSH is getting some much-needed love right now for this reason. Incidentally,

> The CloudFoundry installation instructions alone makes me run away screaming. BOSH is getting some much-needed love right now for this reason. Incidentally, for long-running stateful services, BOSH is the right tool for the job. We use it for Cloud Foundry, MySQL and a bunch of others I don't recall right now. Anyhow. If you just want to see quickly if CF fits your needs, the place to go is Lattice[1], explicitly designed to be installable on a laptop. In the meantime, you can let Pivotal host you on Pivotal Web Services[2]. That plucky startup from Armonk, IBM, are the second-largest donor of engineering effort to Cloud Foundry. Their public installation is BlueMix[3]. Other hosted installations of Cloud Foundry are CenturyLink AppFog[4], anynines[5] and Swisscom Application Cloud[6]. When you decide you want something in-house, you can buy Pivotal Cloud Foundry with all the support bells and whistles. Or you can just use the standard cf-release repo and deploy it to you own OpenStack or vSphere environment. Or on AWS. Or on Azure. Or some mixture of the above. [1] http://lattice.cf http://lattice.cf [2] https://run.pivotal.io https://run.pivotal.io [3] https://console.ng.bluemix.net/ https://console.ng.bluemix.net/ [4] https://www.ctl.io/appfog/ https://www.ctl.io/appfog/ [5] http://www.anynines.com/ http://www.anynines.com/ [6] https://www.swisscom.ch/en/business/enterprise/offer/cloud-data-center-services/paas/application-cloud.html https://www.swisscom.ch/en/business/enterprise/offer/cloud-d... Edit: I'd be interested in hearing why people object to this comment.

bjterry 11y ago
It reads as an extended advertisement for you company's services, and your comment doesn't really respond to the statement of the person you replied to. He said CloudFoundry's installation instructions were bad, then you replied as if he said he was unsure if CF "fit his needs" and was looking for more ways to try it out, which is a pretty salesy response. I think mostly it's a question of tone and length. If you had a couple sentences acknowledging that the installation instructions sucked, and saying he should go with BOSH, you probably wouldn't have gotten downvoted.
- jacques_chester 11y ago
  Thanks. I was too emotionally invested. I actually work for Pivotal Labs, not Pivotal Cloud Foundry (though as of this week I'm on secondment to a PCF-related team). As a consulting engineer I get to see a lot of projects in a lot of companies. My eagerness for PaaSes comes from seeing a variety of approaches. Just using a PaaS makes large, expensive, disruptive discussions simply disappear. Those who go through my history will note that I take pains to mention other PaaSes, usually Heroku and OpenShift. When I talk about hosted Cloud Foundry I usually namecheck ours and IBM's.
vidarh 11y ago
> Anyhow. If you just want to see quickly if CF fits your needs, the place to go is Lattice[1], explicitly designed to be installable on a laptop. The issue is not whether or not CF can meet my needs, but that it is crazily complex. That it is complex enough that there's a need for a separat setup "explicily designed to be installable on a laptop" is to me an admission that CF is flawed from the outset. I don't care if it's' installable on a laptop, incidentally, I do all my development and testing and experimentations on setups that matches (in architecture anyway) the environments I'll deploy to. Exactly because I refuse to follow a setup built to be easy to get up on a dev machine only to find out that the full production deployment ends up being totally different (a lot of software fails here). > In the meantime, you can let Pivotal host you on Pivotal Web Services[2]. No, I can't. It's not remotely cost effective for the types of things I do. E.g. for one client I currently part-time manage a private cloud environment with abou 150 containers. Firstly, none of Pivotals options offer enough CPU or memory for us to be able to run it on 150 of the 2GB container options (it'd be more like 500+ at that size), but even if 150 was enough, the estimated cost for that would be substantially more than what it costs to lease racks + power + bandwidth + leasing costs on all the hardware + charging the cost of hardware upgrades/maintainenance and the cost of server admin. With more realistic container counts, it'd bankrupt the company in question. > and deploy it to you own OpenStack or vSphere environment. Or on AWS. Or on Azure. Or some mixture of the above. The complexity and/or cost of these options makes CF massive unattractive for me. I'm just in the process of cutting a clients hosting costs by about 80% by ditching AWS for a setup on managed servers, for example, and the full deployment of all the infrastructure we need is substantially simpler than just deploying a "bare" OpenStack deployment, and certainly nothing like putting CF on top. They can afford an awful lot of my time to help implement additional functionality for what they save by that move.
- thewoolleyman 11y ago
  > I'm just in the process of cutting a clients hosting costs by about 80% by ditching AWS for a setup on managed servers... And what are the additional long-term development/sysadmin costs of having to manage those servers and infrastructure? And how did the client factor in the risk of being tied to you and your knowledge of this particular managed server setup? And how did the client factor in the risk of being tied to a particular vendor's managed servers? It may very well have still been the right decision for the client to move from cloud to managed servers. However, my point is that if you solely base the cloud vs. managed decision on hosting costs, you are ignoring other real long-term costs and risks that are not as readily apparent, but can still have a significant impact in terms of upgrades, maintainability, downtime, availability, changes in personnel, etc.

bjterry 11y ago

It reads as an extended advertisement for you company's services, and your comment doesn't really respond to the statement of the person you replied to. He said CloudFoundry's installation instructions were bad, then you replied as if he said he was unsure if CF "fit his needs" and was looking for more ways to try it out, which is a pretty salesy response. I think mostly it's a question of tone and length. If you had a couple sentences acknowledging that the installation instructions sucked, and saying he should go with BOSH, you probably wouldn't have gotten downvoted.

jacques_chester 11y ago
Thanks. I was too emotionally invested. I actually work for Pivotal Labs, not Pivotal Cloud Foundry (though as of this week I'm on secondment to a PCF-related team). As a consulting engineer I get to see a lot of projects in a lot of companies. My eagerness for PaaSes comes from seeing a variety of approaches. Just using a PaaS makes large, expensive, disruptive discussions simply disappear. Those who go through my history will note that I take pains to mention other PaaSes, usually Heroku and OpenShift. When I talk about hosted Cloud Foundry I usually namecheck ours and IBM's.

vidarh 11y ago

> Anyhow. If you just want to see quickly if CF fits your needs, the place to go is Lattice[1], explicitly designed to be installable on a laptop. The issue is not whether or not CF can meet my needs, but that it is crazily complex. That it is complex enough that there's a need for a separat setup "explicily designed to be installable on a laptop" is to me an admission that CF is flawed from the outset. I don't care if it's' installable on a laptop, incidentally, I do all my development and testing and experimentations on setups that matches (in architecture anyway) the environments I'll deploy to. Exactly because I refuse to follow a setup built to be easy to get up on a dev machine only to find out that the full production deployment ends up being totally different (a lot of software fails here). > In the meantime, you can let Pivotal host you on Pivotal Web Services[2]. No, I can't. It's not remotely cost effective for the types of things I do. E.g. for one client I currently part-time manage a private cloud environment with abou 150 containers. Firstly, none of Pivotals options offer enough CPU or memory for us to be able to run it on 150 of the 2GB container options (it'd be more like 500+ at that size), but even if 150 was enough, the estimated cost for that would be substantially more than what it costs to lease racks + power + bandwidth + leasing costs on all the hardware + charging the cost of hardware upgrades/maintainenance and the cost of server admin. With more realistic container counts, it'd bankrupt the company in question. > and deploy it to you own OpenStack or vSphere environment. Or on AWS. Or on Azure. Or some mixture of the above. The complexity and/or cost of these options makes CF massive unattractive for me. I'm just in the process of cutting a clients hosting costs by about 80% by ditching AWS for a setup on managed servers, for example, and the full deployment of all the infrastructure we need is substantially simpler than just deploying a "bare" OpenStack deployment, and certainly nothing like putting CF on top. They can afford an awful lot of my time to help implement additional functionality for what they save by that move.

thewoolleyman 11y ago
> I'm just in the process of cutting a clients hosting costs by about 80% by ditching AWS for a setup on managed servers... And what are the additional long-term development/sysadmin costs of having to manage those servers and infrastructure? And how did the client factor in the risk of being tied to you and your knowledge of this particular managed server setup? And how did the client factor in the risk of being tied to a particular vendor's managed servers? It may very well have still been the right decision for the client to move from cloud to managed servers. However, my point is that if you solely base the cloud vs. managed decision on hosting costs, you are ignoring other real long-term costs and risks that are not as readily apparent, but can still have a significant impact in terms of upgrades, maintainability, downtime, availability, changes in personnel, etc.