FAQ
Pivotal CF:
The Power of an App-centric Approach
FAQS AROUND APPINSTANCES, CONTAINERS AND INFRASTRUCTURE UTILIZATION
INTRODUCTION
T
his document explains the basics of Pivotal’s App-Centric Approach and covers frequently asked questions
about App Instances, Containers and Microservices. Pivotal’s App Instance (AI) model makes it easy for
IT Operations to scale applications, manage app health, and improve infrastructure utilization. The result is a
highly responsive and dynamic platform for your Developer and IT Ops teams.
WHAT IS AN APP-CENTRIC APPROACH?
Containers are a logical construct with the primary goal to
provide isolation and abstraction. In Pivotal CF, each AI runs in its
own container. Containers virtualize the underlying OS leading
the application to believe that they have full, unshared access to
pivotal.io
Virtual
Virt
tua
al Machine
Machiine
App A
App A’
App
pp A
App A’
Middleware
Middleware
Guest OS
Guest OS
App
pp B
App C
Container
HOW DOES AN APPINSTANCE RELATE WITH
CONTAINERS AND MICROSERVICES?
Pivotal CF
VM2
Co
Container
The concept of an AI is central to cloud computing. An AI
represents an application or part of an application and acts as
the basic building block for scaling and responding to changes
in the volume of requests to the app. At any given time, an
application may be running as one AI or many AI’s, handling
requests across all of them.
VM1
Containers provide each
AppInstance its own isolated
share of resources
Container
Co
WHAT IS AN APPLICATION INSTANCE (AI)
AND WHY IS IT POWERFUL?
VM’s only abstract
underlying hardware limiting
resource utilization
App Runtime
An Application-centric approach puts applications at the center
of your Developer and IT Operations teams. All underlying
infrastructure and platforms are built with a single goal in mind
– Accelerate application deployment at scale. A continuous
delivery model supports an app-centric approach where the
focus is on application orchestration as opposed to configuration
management in the traditional infrastructure-centric approach.
An app-centric model supports cloud-ready apps, making them
easier to manage, deploy, and migrate.
their very own copy of that OS and middleware. This is analogous
to what Virtual Machines (VM) do when they virtualize the
hardware at a lower level. Containers allow multiple AIs to run on
a single VM to maximize its flexibility and utilization.
OS
Hypervisor
Hypervisor
Compute, Storage, Network
Compute, Storage, Network
Microservices is an architectural approach to developing a
single application as a suite of small services, each running in its
own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms,
often an HTTP resource API. These services are built around
business capabilities and independently deployed; they could be
developed in different languages by different teams. Pivotal CF
App Instances are built on a microservices architecture enabling
rapid scaling where resources are needed, as opposed to scaling
the entire application stack in a VM (‘scale out vs. scale up’).
FAQ PIVOTAL CF: THE POWER OF AN APP-CENTRIC APPROACH
WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF APPLICATION
INSTANCES IN PIVOTAL CF?
Application instances are essential to making Pivotal CF flexible
and customer TCO predictable:
•
AIs abstract underlying infrastructure differences in pricing
and physical characteristics. As enterprise infrastructure needs
change or diversify, AIs act as the common unit of measure
offering a predictable TCO.
•
AIs serve as a common unit of scale across many types of
applications using the variety of languages and frameworks
supported by Pivotal CF.
•
AIs offer better infrastructure utilization by providing more
application density than VM’s.
Additionally, the subscription price includes
•
Ability to run a variety of apps on the same platform e.g. Java,
Spring, Ruby Node.js, PHP, Python, Go and more
•
Commercial support
- Linux Virtual Appliance also including OS updates
- Support for Tomcat application container and Spring
Framework
Pivotal CF removes the complexity and reduces the cost of
managing this collection of different products that forms a major
impediment today for companies seeking to compete in the new
app economy.
IMPROVED INFRASTRUCTURE UTILIZATION
HOW DOES PIVOTAL CF OFFER VALUE IN AN
APPLICATION INSTANCE?
TURNKEY EXPERIENCE
Functionality resulting from an assembly of several technologies
and products like application servers, infrastructure monitoring,
server configuration automation, and much more, is all
incorporated into the turnkey PaaS experience. Every AI deployed
on Pivotal CF automatically benefits from:
•
App health management
•
Software load balancing
•
Application performance monitoring
•
Log aggregation and export
•
Network access policy enforcement
•
Audit events
•
Service discovery and secure credential storage
•
Access to a variety of Dev Services.
e.g. MySQL for Pivotal CF
In Pivotal CF, AIs consume only a fraction of the Virtual Machine
(VM) resources for CPU, memory, disk usage, and network access.
It’s modern architecture improves infrastructure utilization by
optimally packing together variable sized application containers
that are isolated to prevent competition for VM resources.
ELASTIC, SELF HEALING AND HIGHLY AVAILABLE APPS
Pivotal CF enables a no downtime ethos because built in to every
AI is auto scaling, self healing, 4 levels of high availability making IT
Teams magnitudes more efficient.
LEARN MORE
To learn more about our products, services and solutions, visit us
at pivotal.io.
Pivotal CF App Instance
Commercial Support
Multiple Runtimes
App Health Management
On Demand Scheduled Scaling
MySQL (Dev)
Load Balancing/DNS
Application Performance Metrics
At Pivotal our mission is to enable customers to build a new class of applications, leveraging big and fast data, and do all of this with the power of cloud independence.
Uniting selected technology, people and programs from EMC and VMware, the following products and services are now part of Pivotal: Greenplum, Cloud Foundry, Spring,
GemFire and other products from the VMware vFabric Suite, Cetas and Pivotal Labs.
Pivotal 3495 Deer Creek Road Palo Alto, CA 94304 pivotal.io
Pivotal is a registered trademark or trademark of Pivotal Software, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. © Copyright 2014 Pivotal Software, Inc.
All rights reserved. Published in the USA. PVTL-FAQ-401-09/14