Cloud Foundry by MindSphere¶

Overview¶

MindSphere offers a managed runtime environment powered by Cloud Foundry to easily run own applications across all regions. The following features and Buildpacks are currently supported. This is subject to change and might be enriched over the time.

Access MindSphere Cloud Foundry¶

Use the official Cloud Foundry CLI for accessing your development environment. The API-endpoint is: https://api.cf.{region}.{mindsphere-domain}.

Initially only the original administrator of the MindAccess Developer or Operator Plan has administrator (called OrgManager) permissions for Cloud Foundry. If you want to give other users Cloud Foundry access permissions, you must use the Cloud Foundry command-line tool. Note that the MindSphere Settings cannot be used to grant or remove these permissions.

The following steps describe the procedure to check the supported version of Cloud Foundry buildpacks:

1. Login to MindSphere Cloud Foundry.
2. Execute the command "cf marketplace" to check the supported buildpacks. To search for the specific buildpack version, refer https://github.com/cloudfoundry. The details about the supported programming language versions, refer the chapter "Packaged binaries".
3. Use ^ ~ inside the package.json file to install a compatible or similar version.

Cloud Foundry Updates¶

In this section we describe the process of an Cloud Foundry update. Cloud Foundry implements a rolling update concept to avoid downtimes. During the update each component will be updated sequentially and restarted afterwards. Therefore, each Cloud Foundry component uses multiple instances (horizontal scaling) to ensure availability. Yet, this has implications of the duration of updates as those depend on the number of services and virtual machines to update.

The same principles as for the Cloud Foundry components also apply to applications running on top of Cloud Foundry. Therefore you must run at least two of an application to ensure high availability and reduce downtimes during update phases. During the Cloud Foundry update the virtual machine on which the application container is executed will be shutdown, updated and restarted. There will be a short downtime if you have only one instance running. Cloud Foundry will notice a problem with the application and will start another instance.

Benefits of Cloud Foundry¶

Why should I use Cloud Foundry? The following subsections and bullet points give a brief overview about the advantages of Cloud Foundry.

Structured platform¶

• Incorporates best practices for developing cloud software
• Proven to work in a practical way
• Reducing complexity due to standard procedures (e.g. service binding)
• Predefined procedures for deployment and app management that reduce operational effort

Easy and fast app development with focus on the business logic¶

• No need to care about underlying infrastructure, OS and runtime
• Out-of-the-box scaling, load-balancing, health management and configuration management
• Apps run in isolated containerized environments

Security by MindSphere¶

• Industrially hardened Stemcells
• Managed Buildpacks with a high level of security standard (e.g. CVE scanning)
• Managed Backing Services with automated backup capabilities (plan medium or higher)
• Separation of Concerns - clear separation of development and production environments)
• Positive Security Concept for Applications and APIs

Operations efforts reduced¶

• Out of the box security, patch, backup, release management for the underlying layers
• Ensuring app compatibility during updates of OS and buildpacks
• Managed Cloud Foundry platform with zero downtime on a stable IaaS layer

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