OpenStack Mitaka Design Summit

CloudFoundry (CF) is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that is designed to be agnostic to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds and application platforms. This means that CF can be deployed in many IaaS, e.g., AWS, OpenStack, SoftLayer, and deploy different applications of varied platforms, e.g., Ruby-on-Rails, Python-Django, Golang, PHP/Zen, and so on.

CF achieves it’s cross-cloud capabilities by defining a thin layer called Cloud Provider Interface (CPI) that is implemented for each targeted cloud and is used by a CF cloud tooling called BOSH to help create, manage, and maintain IaaS resources such as VMs, IPs, and storages.

One of the key targeted clouds in the CF community are those supporting OpenStack. Using an OpenStack CPI we should in theory easily deploy CF, which consists of at least 10s of VMs with sometimes dozens of running jobs (long running processes), onto OpenStack clouds.

While the results are achievable in theory, in practice, what we have seen is that the actual deployments and maintenance of CF installations in different OpenStack providers of the same version result in changes and differences that bleed into the CPI layer. This means that the same CPI needs to be changed even though we target two OpenStack clouds supporting the same API version!

In this talk we describe the CF BOSH CPI layer and the various reasons why in our experiences we are still not able to perfect cross-cloud deployments of large systems, such as CF, in different OpenStack providers and versions.