what is Cloud Foundry & spring

Question

I am trying to get the idea of cloud serves but didn't get the point of that. Dose it can replace a server for the app? what is the purpose of it? I have an android app and I what to get info from the server can it be done with Cloud Foundry and what is spring and how it connects to Cloud Foundry. If you can give me link of how to communicate android app with Cloud Foundry

thanks a lot!

Answer 1

CloudFoundry's an open-source PaaS (github.com/cloudfoundry). It commoditizes the stack - that is, in practical terms, it makes it dead simple to get things like databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB), messaging (RabbitMQ), and web servers (Tomcat) up and running quickly. Whereas clouds like AWS let you spin up CPUs and hard disks and a stock OS install, a PaaS like CloudFoundry lets you spin up infrastructure, like message brokers, databases, and web servers and routers. So, yes, it replaces a server (or, often more importantly, it can stand in for 1000 servers on-demand). That's the obvious part.

CloudFoundry itself is open source, so unlike other PaaS solutions, by building on top of CF you're not locked into CF. You can later decide to run the cloud locally on your own datacenter, or on some other CloudFoundry provider (CloudFoundry.com is just one provider of the CloudFoundry software. Just as you can easily re-target a git repisotry to have it point to any remote repository using the git command line tool, you can re-target the CloudFoundry 'vmc' command line tool to point to a different CloudFoundry install.

Spring's a development framework in Java. It's not the only way to consume CF, but I personally think it's quite nice. CF exposes a lot of different technologies for the eager technologist and Spring provides the only comprehensive library set that can handle all those options. Learn one Spring library and the others will feel simialar, and so it's more natural to get started with a new API and technology. In the way that APIs designed with idiomatic Python APIs are said to be "Pythonic," Spring's APIs are cohesive and work nicely together. However, if Java's not your cup of tea (punny!), then that's OK too. CloudFoundry supports Ruby on Rails, Scala, Node.js, and other cloudfoundry providers support alternatives (Stacato supports Python, AppFog supports PHP, etc.)

For a quick example demonstrating how to get started with Spring, and the SpringSource Tool Suite, and a development virtual machine for CloudFoundry (so you can develop locally and quickly), check out this blog (and, particularly, the video embedded therein): http://blog.springsource.com/2011/08/24/micro-cloud-foundry-for-spring-developers/

Answer 2

The Springsource team has been doing some interesting work this year integrating a variety of Spring projects with Cloud Foundry.

With the rising popularity of microservices, many of the Spring projects are proving to be useful not only for quickly developing these smaller, lighter weight services, but also for easily incorporating some of the projects from Netflix OSS that implement patterns for making them industrial strength even at web scale.

A few related links:

• The latest Cloud Foundry Java buildpacks include support for Spring Boot and Spring Auto-reconfig (https://github.com/cloudfoundry/java-buildpack/releases).
• The CF docs contain an example on deploying Spring Boot apps to Cloud Foundry or Heroku
• The new Spring Cloud project will "Integrate your application with Pivotal Cloudfoundry. Makes it easy to implement SSO and OAuth2 protected resources, and also to create a Cloudfoundry service broker."

I look forward to seeing more of the results from the collaboration between the Cloud Foundry and Spring teams. One evidence of this is a recent tweet from Pivotal's James Watters "As the Microservices trends take off its pretty amazing to have the world's leading lightwieght @springframework on same team as CF."