Frequently Asked Questions

What is Cloud Foundry?
What is Cloud Foundry?

Cloud Foundry is an open platform as a service, providing a choice of clouds, developer frameworks and application services. Cloud Foundry makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications. It is an open source project and is available through a variety of private cloud distributions and public cloud instances, including CloudFoundry.com.
How can I use Cloud Foundry?
How can I use Cloud Foundry?

Cloud Foundry is available as:
- A complete hosted PaaS environment (CloudFoundry.com).
- An open source project where developers and community members can collaborate and contribute to the project.
- A complete version of Cloud Foundry that runs in a virtual machine on a developer’s Mac or PC (Micro Cloud Foundry).
What is CloudFoundry.com?
What is CloudFoundry.com?

CloudFoundry.com is a public instance of Cloud Foundry. CloudFoundry.com supports the Spring, Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, Scala and node.js frameworks. CloudFoundry.com supports Postgres, RabbitMQ, MongoDB, MySQL and Redis. Other Cloud Foundry Instances may vary in what frameworks and app services they choose to support.
What is Micro Cloud Foundry™?
What is Micro Cloud Foundry™?

Micro Cloud Foundry is a downloadable version of Cloud Foundry that can run on a developer's laptop. Micro Cloud Foundry contains a version of the Cloud Foundry software and offers symmetry with other instances of Cloud Foundry. It allows access to modern frameworks and a rich ecosystem of application services. Applications deployed on Micro Cloud Foundry will run with minimal modification on any private or public cloud running Cloud Foundry.

For more information and to download your Micro Cloud Foundry, please click here.
What does Cloud Foundry include?
What does Cloud Foundry include?

Cloud Foundry is a cloud-era application platform which includes a self-service application execution engine, an automation engine for application deployment and lifecycle management, a scriptable command line interface (CLI), integration with development tools to ease development and deployment processes and an open architecture for quick development framework integration, application services interface and cloud provider interface.
What programming languages does Cloud Foundry support?
What programming languages does Cloud Foundry support?

At this time, CloudFoundry.com (the public instance of Cloud Foundry) supports applications written in Spring, Java, Rails and Sinatra for Ruby, Node.js. Scala and other JVM languages/frameworks including Groovy and Grails. In addition, the Cloud Foundry open source project offers additional languages/frameworks support via partners including PHP, Python, .NET and more. For additional information please refer to the Cloud Foundry blog at blog.cloudfoundry.com.
What Application Services does Cloud Foundry support?
What Application Services does Cloud Foundry support?

At this time, CloudFoundry.com (the public instance of Cloud Foundry) supports Postgres, RabbitMQ and Redis. Additional services are available from the open source community including MySQL and MongoDB. Other Cloud Foundry Instances may vary in what frameworks and app services they choose to support. For additional information please refer to the Cloud Foundry blog at blog.cloudfoundry.com.
Who should use Cloud Foundry?
Who should use Cloud Foundry?

Cloud Foundry is ideal for any developer interested in removing the cost and complexity of configuring infrastructure and runtime environments for their applications without locking themselves into a single cloud. Developers can deploy their applications to Cloud Foundry using their existing tools and with zero modification to their code.
Why should a developer use Cloud Foundry?
Why should a developer use Cloud Foundry?

Cloud Foundry allows developers to focus on applications, not machines or middleware. Traditional application deployments require developers to configure and patch systems, maintain middleware and worry about network topologies. Cloud Foundry allows you to focus on your application, not infrastructure, and deploy and scale applications in seconds.
How is Cloud Foundry different from existing PaaS offerings?
How is Cloud Foundry different from existing PaaS offerings?

Cloud Foundry takes an open approach to Platform as a Service. Most PaaS offerings restrict developer choices of frameworks, application infrastructure services and deployment clouds. The open and extensible nature of Cloud Foundry means developers will not be locked into a single framework, single set of application services or a single cloud.
How will Cloud Foundry be priced?
How will Cloud Foundry be priced?

The Cloud Foundry initiative has multiple offerings. CloudFoundry.com can be accessed for free. Users of the beta service will be notified regarding the end of beta phase and onset of commercial service. The pricing of commercial service is not being announced as of now.

Micro Cloud Foundry is a free download at micro.cloudfoundry.com for developers interested in a single instance, personal PaaS on your local machine.

GitHub.com hosts the community-driven open source Cloud Foundry code. The developer community is able to freely download and build it.
Why is Cloud Foundry technology available as open source software?
Why is Cloud Foundry technology available as open source software?

Cloud Foundry is based on an open system architecture with the fundamental tenets of friction-free development. We believe that in the cloud era, this maps to flexibility and community participation, i.e. open source. With this fundamental belief, we are open sourcing the Cloud Foundry application execution engine, application services interface and cloud provider interface.
How can I start using Cloud Foundry?
How can I start using Cloud Foundry?

The easiest way to start using Cloud Foundry is either through the public service at CloudFoundry.com or through downloading and running Micro Cloud Foundry. Registration for Cloud Foundry to use the service or to download Micro Cloud Foundry is free.
My company prohibits the use of public clouds. Can I still use Cloud Foundry?
My company prohibits the use of public clouds. Can I still use Cloud Foundry?

One of the core tenets of Cloud Foundry is that it is free from underlying infrastructure. This gives users the choice of using their existing infrastructure (desktop, datacenter and private clouds) and still leverage all the benefits of PaaS.

Micro Cloud Foundry can be downloaded and deployed on your machine so that you can run a single instance PaaS environment suitable for quick development and testing cycles.

Additionally, developers may refer to more details on running the Cloud Foundry open source project on our Running Cloud Foundry pages to find relevant details to download and build their own private platform. This customized platform can be deployed on the infrastructure of your choice.
How can I start contributing to the Cloud Foundry open source project?
How can I start contributing to the Cloud Foundry open source project?

We welcome developer contributions to the open source Cloud Foundry project. Please visit the Get Involved and Contribute page to get instructions on how to join the community and start contributing.
How is this different from the original Cloud Foundry service?
How is this different from the original Cloud Foundry service?

The Cloud Foundry service previously hosted at CloudFoundry.com allows developers to quickly deploy Java Spring applications on Amazon Web Services infrastructure. This service is now available at classic.cloudfoundry.com.

The Cloud Foundry initiative announced on April 12th, 2011 is a full-featured, open PaaS service that allows customers to build and deploy applications on multiple frameworks and multiple clouds.
Where can I learn more about Cloud Foundry?
Where can I learn more about Cloud Foundry?
- To learn more about our commercial service, please read through this website.
- To learn more about the open source project, please visit our Get Involved and Contribute page.