CloudFoundry

All service related information is exposed through VCAP_SERVICES environment variable. The content of this variable is JSON such as: {"mysql-5.1":[{"name":"mysql-1fd96","label":"mysql-5.1","plan":"free","credentials":{"node_id":"mysql_node_7","hostname":"172.30.48.26","port":3306,"password":"jmsdmnfsdfn","name":"df18176fc6336456db8907cfd7565e311","user":"u4HUGiJwB5l5A"}}]} You application can connect to database using this information. If you are using Java, we have runtime that simplifies the access (see https://github.com/cloudfoundry/vcap-java/tree/master/cloudfoundry-....

Technology But what is the technology behind Cloud Foundry? Cloud Foundry offers a set of services. These are infrastructure components - currently MySQL and the NoSQL databases Redis and MongoDB are supported. They are provisioned and managed by the Cloud Foundry environment. Cloud Foundry can be used to create and delete instances of such services. When an application is deployed in Cloud Foundry, services can be bound to the application. The binding must be configured accordingly using the Cloud Foundry tools. But how can the application code actually use the services? This is where the integration of Cloud Foundry into the different frameworks comes in. For example in Spring an existing DataSource in the application will be automatically replaced with a DataSource for a Cloud Foundry MySQL service. Or you can use the new cloud Spring XML namespace to bind to other services, or if you need more control. Similar support is available for Grails and Spring Roo is also supported. Java applications are installed on a Tomcat web server, so you can also install Java applications on Cloud Foundry that were not created with any of the supported frameworks. However, in this case, you cannot use Cloud Foundry services. The code for the framework integration is also available as Open Source. So support for other frameworks should not be difficult to implement. In essence, you have to determine the services from an environment variable and make them available to the application. Also, the code that integrates the various services like MongoDB or MySQL in Cloud Foundry is available as Open Source. So adding support for other services should also be easy to implement. Cloud Foundry even supports frameworks beyond Java: The list of supported frameworks include Node.js (JavaScript) and the Ruby frameworks Rails and Sinatra. The infrastructure can be managed with the command line tool vmc or with the integration into Eclipse / SpringSource Tool Suite. Cloud Foundry is presented as just another server in the Eclipse Server view and also the services can be administered there.

Java: The Spring cloud namespace parses the environment variables into a java.util.Properties object accessible inside a Spring container.