As part of getting to know Siemens MindSphere we are looking at their offering for developing applications. On MindSphere it is possible to publish applications on a Platform-as-a-Service powered by Cloud Foundry.

Cloud Foundry is an open-source platform as a service (PaaS) that enables developers to deploy applications fast and at scale. With its widespread adoption across big organizations, it's important to understand its basic concepts. This blog post provides the fundamental terminology required to have a basic understanding of Cloud Foundry.

When committing to Cloud Foundry some companies make the strategic decision to take full ownership of platform deployment and operations and deploy the open source Cloud Foundry distribution to fully understand all moving parts. While open source Cloud Foundry has gotten rather easy to deploy with the cf-deployment project, there is still a lot of more to do in order to make an open source deployment production ready. This blog post highlights the challenges we faced unique to deploying the open source Cloud Foundry, and gives advice on how to grow through these challenges.

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.