For those who have used PCF and another paas( heroku, beanstalk,openshift etc). How does your experience compare between the two ?
CF is a very similar dev experience to heroku which I find fantastic. The 'how does my app run' question will probably change in the future (diego -> k8s) but the buildpack abstraction will make that a non issue as a developer. PCF is expensive, but so is heorku. You're paying for the support which is top knotch. OSS CF takes a great deal of understanding like any big distributed system. BOSH is a tough tool to ramp up on but easy once you do.
Evaluated it 3 years ago. It wasn't ready for prime time back then. Is PaaS still a thing?
Yeah. Google App Engine is still a thing, and Khan Academy, afaik, still runs on App Engine. To me, that was a bizarre choice from the beginning. K8 and Elastic beanstalks are all PaaS.
Even IBM Cloud PaaS is built on top of CF
At my previous job, we used CF. We were many version behind so my experience was quite negative. However, objectively speaking, CF is actually a good solution. Application life cycle is managed by cf. failover etc. CF was revolutionary in the open source community in the sense that someone put such platform together. K8 came much later. The issue we ran into even after upgrading to a version close to latest at the time was the technology had a couple single point of failure and the use of etcd at the time really put us off. When etcd failed, everything would fail. At the time cf didn’t support zone awareness and multi-az/multi-region setup was very difficult. I can’t recall the details now, but I remember we went to Pivtoal and we spoke about using their CF platform instead of self hosting. I don’t know if the company went through it, but Pivtoal version comes with upgrade manager and access management tool. So my opinion on this is it’s an okay solution especially if you go self host but managment needs to be careful. I would not go with openshift (seems like a dead thing to me), herkou is expensive as fuck; beanstalk is inflexible. Your bet is either building your own k8, or aurora/mesos, or cf.
Super interesting feedback! This definitely sounds like your experience was from the early days of CF. Based on your description I'm guessing you were running a version from like 2014-2015 or so? Nowadays, multi-AZ is out of the box for all supported IaaSes (AWS, GCP, Azure, vSphere, OpenStack). etcd is still there but redundantly converged; Consul is out because of the reasons you mentioned. The main reason people are using PCF is because they want to push applications and they don't want to need a Kubernetes cluster just to do that; developers shouldn't need to get exposed to the plumbing just to have their apps work. (Although if you do need a Kubernetes cluster, Pivotal also has PKS, a Kubernetes management solution that spins up clusters in standardized ways so you don't have 5,000 slightly different and impossible-to-manage cluster YAML descriptions.) If you don't want to use PCF I definitely wouldn't consider Mesos an alternative; that's much lower-level. The best bet is probably Kubernetes if you don't mind doing the heavy lifting and cluster infrastructure HA yourself.
Yeah we were. Then before we left we left on the older version because our consultants could not get the target version working without the random crashes. But I am sure cf has gotten better. I am still unsure about etcd - perhaps the older version was crappy, but still frighten me to know one broken etcd could have a cascade impact. Anyway, I’ve gotten over cf for a long time :)