This blog post covers basic DevOps practices. If you already feel confident with DevOps you may want to read Thriving with DevOps: An Advanced Checklist.

With the frequency of patch releases being available for Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF), it becomes inevitable to automate their roll out in any professional operations setup. The patch releases often contain security fixes that harden the deployment, but also lot's of bug fixes that are highly useful to roll out. Typically, operators need to not only upgrade a single Cloud Foundry environment, but have to operate and patch multiple deployments of Cloud Foundry.

In any on-premise deployment there are usually a bunch of self-signed certificate authorities (CA) that need to be trusted from all VMs in the BOSH deployment (and the jobs running on the VMs). This blog post sheds some light on where to provide CA bundles in order to establish trust in BOSH deployments.

Cloud Foundry deploys application containers on so-called Diego cells. Each Diego cell runs a number of application containers and exposes the applications through random ports on the Diego cell. This blog post shows some very useful debugging and analysis tricks for Diego. First, we determine the Cloud Foundry app belonging to a Diego container and second, we locate the containers for a specific application URL using the cfdot command line utility.

Running open-source Cloud Foundry is a challenging task. Compared to vendor-distilled distributions deploying open-source Cloud Foundry requires in-depth knowledge of BOSH and Cloud Foundry itself. This blog post shows solutions to typical operations topics when taking open-source Cloud Foundry to production and gives an overview of what it takes to run the Cloud Foundry core itself.