Andy Piper is a developer advocate for Cloud Foundry, an open source, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution similar to Heroku and OpenShift.

We caught up with Andy at OSCON this year, and he talked about some of the differences between PaaS and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions like OpenStack, Apache CloudStack, Amazon EC2 or VMware's vSphere. One of the things that differentiates Cloud Foundry from other cloud PaaS solutions is that it is agnostic about which cloud backend you choose to use. Unlike some other PaaS solutions, Cloud Foundry is open source, and all of its code can be found on the Cloud Foundry GitHub account.

Cloud Foundry focuses on providing an application-centric solution that enables the frictionless development and deployment of apps from your laptop to production. Piper talks a bit about how they use Warden containers, their lightweight provisioning solution.

Cloud Foundry makes it possible to deploy to different cloud infrastructures. Because of the differences in auto-scaling among the various platforms, scaling out applications often requires human intervention. Piper talks about the reasons for this, and why this is a difficult problem to solve. He hopes to see more policy-based scaling sometime in the future.

Finally, he talks about Cloud Foundry's high-availability and Blue/Green deployment capabilities, as well as how multi-datacenter deployments are achieved at the load balancing layer.

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