Advantages of Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF)

1. Faster Development Iteration.

2. Improved Efficiency with IT Operations Management.

3. Easy Portability with Applications

4. Greater Developer Productivity

5. High Availability

6. Health Management for Applications

7. Centralized platform Administration

8. Seamless Cloud Platform Usage.

9. Dynamic Routing.

10. Increased Time to Production.

Cloud Foundry Runtime Components :

Cloud Foundry components include a self-service application execution engine, an automation engine for application deployment, and lifecycle management, and a scriptable command line interface (CLI). Also, an integration with development tools to ease deployment processes. Cloud Foundry has an open architecture that includes a buildpack mechanism for adding frameworks, an application services interface, and a cloud provider interface.

Routing

1. Router : A unique route exist for each application. Cloud Foundry uses this router to map incoming request to the right application.

Authentication

1. OAuth2 Server (UAA) and Login Server : User Authorization And Authentication (UAA), provides identity, security and authorization services.

App Lifecycle

1. Cloud Controller and Diego Brain : Cloud Controller provide restful interface to domain object, it reponse to client like CLI, WEB UI, Spring STS
2. nsync, Cell Reps,BBS : The nsync, BBS, and Cell Rep components work together along a chain to keep apps running. At one end is the user. At the other end are the instances of applications running on widely-distributed VMs, which may crash or become unavailable.

App Storage and Execution

1. Blobstore : Storage for droplets and binary large files. Eliminates the need to reupload/restage when scaling application. NFS mounted storage or Amazon S3 store
2. Diego Cell : Diego is a self healing container system that attempts to keep the correct number of instances running in Diego cells to avoid network failures and crashes.

Services

1. Service Brokers : Provide an interface for native and external third party services. For Example, Mail Server, Messaging etc.

Messaging

1. Internal HTTPS and BBS : Bulletin Board System (BBS), central co ordination for activities (actions) within cloud foundry.

Metrics and Logging

1. Loggregator : Master logging process, which accepts logs from application instances and cloud foundry components. You can use cf log command to see the logs. It is non persistent, temporary log storage. It accumulates logs from multiple sources and aggregates by application.
2. Metrics Collector : The metrics collector gathers metrics and statistics from the components. Operators can use this information to monitor a Cloud Foundry deployment.