Azure vs Cloud Foundry

Question

I'm new to cloud foundry and would like to do a detailed comparison between Windows Azure and Cloud Foundry. I've searched around a lot but haven't been able to find anything useful. Is there a good post or some material which does a detailed feature wise comparison of the two?

Regards, Vikram

Answer 1

You're not exactly comparing like for like here. Azure has IaaS type capability as well as PaaS, not only can you push applications to it but you can also deploy VM images too, including Linux.

However, as Cloud Foundry is open source the number of runtimes and frameworks if supports evolves quickly as VMWare openly encourage contributions from the OSS community. Correct me if I am wrong, but in a lot of cases, with Azure, you have to provide the runtime you wish to use where as Cloud Foundry supports them "natively", if that's the correct word?!

Right now, Cloud Foundry supports the following runtimes and frameworks;

Runtimes

java - 1.6.0_24
java7 - 1.7.0_04
node - 0.4.12
node06 - 0.6.8
node08 - 0.8.2
ruby18 - 1.8.7p357
ruby19 - 1.9.2p180

Frameworks

grails
java_web
lift
node
play
rack
rails3
sinatra
spring
standalone

They also provide all the major storage services too, including MySQL, Postgres, RabbitMQ and Redis.

The actual open source project supports a whole lot more too!

Answer 2

I don't know much about Azure. But, I've used Cloudfoundry. Its great for Java deployments. I use VMC from Ruby gem for deployment and its so 3 - 4 step easy way to push your WAR to cloudfoundry server. They also provide neat documentation for configuration and setup. Oh and adding services (like Mongo DB, MySql) are also very simple. Though,sometimes, debugging server related issues are annoying with it. But, overall, its good for me :)

http://docs.cloudfoundry.com/tools/deploying-apps.html