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Ask HN: Using Cloud Foundry in production?

3 points by sirwinston ↗ HN
My company is planning to start using Cloud Foundry running on Open Stack for our main business to consumer sites (doing most of our sales). The initiative is primary pushed by dev teams that like the ease of deployment.

As supported distributions from Pivotal, IBM & HP are quite expensive they want to use the Open Source ('free') version to run CF on-premise. Given that OPS has limited experience with both CF and Open Stack this seems pretty ambitious to me.

If have tried to find other companies that use a similar setup in production but I could not find one in my network. Hence this post with the question to HN readers to share their experience (ease of setup, stability, etc) with a similar setup.

Another related question I have is if someone has experience with running Docker containers in production on CF Diego. Our architects seem to have the opinion that CF can be used to replace our Docker Swarm environment as well.

4 comments

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I essentially have the same questions as you do. I'd like to evaluate Cloud Foundry, here, where I work.

I'll probably bake-off DC/OS and Cloud Foundry; maybe I'll also bake-off one or more of DEIS Workflow, SuperGiant, and maybe Apcera.

All of this is an eval for an enterprise-grade Docker platform, for development through production, including CI/CD.

yinchak
Same here, but references seem to be nonexistent for on premise OS version.
EngineerBetter
Disclaimer - I co-founded a Cloud Foundry consultancy.

There are numerous folks running open source Cloud Foundry in production. Most I can't name for confidentiality reasons, but the Comic Relief payments system runs on open source CF on a variety of infrastructures.

Once you've got open source Cloud Foundry deployed and managed with Bosh, and you're using Concourse to update it, you should have a reasonably easy time. Numerous governments deploy open source Cloud Foundry this way (UK, USA, Australia, with several others evaluating it currently).

You can run Docker containers on Cloud Foundry's Diego runtime. We normally encourage apps as a unit of deployment currency for a number of reasons (easier auditing, allowing developers to focus on code rather than setting up images), but Diego is battle-tested. Under the hood both apps and Docker containers are run the same way, so you don't need to worry about the Docker stuff being treated differently.

I've not heard great things about OpenStack. I know people who have run very large Cloud Foundry installations on OpenStack, and had production issues with OpenStack network drives, amongst other things. From the anecdotal evidence of people I've spoken to, you're more likely to have problems with OpenStack than with Cloud Foundry.

I'm happy to chat more - search for my username and you'll find us; I don't want to put gratuitous advertising in HN comments :D