Let’s take a look at technical highlights from the newly released Pivotal Cloud Foundry 1.7. Application developers now have more tools for rapid feedback with the launch of native application metrics and a local development environment. Pivotal Cloud Foundry 1.7 also marks the addition of private service brokers, route services as a new class of marketplace service, and context-path based routing for simpler application upgrades and refactoring.
For IT operations teams, our May 2016 platform update delivers new capabilities to manage and monitor applications in production. This includes new security milestones such as IPsec encryption and Ops Manager UAA account integration to meet audit and compliance requirements.
Feature highlights from Pivotal Cloud Foundry 1.7 at a glance:
For Developers:
PCF Metrics
PCF Dev
Route Services
Context-Path Based Routing
Role/Attribute Based Permissions
Private Service Brokers
Private Docker Registries
For Operators:
White-Label Apps Manager
BOSH Addons & IPsec Encryption
Ops Manager UAA Integration
DEVELOPERS
PCF Metrics—The new integrated metrics and monitoring service gives developers real-time feedback on their applications by tracking critical health and performance data. This native service helps developers to rapidly detect and troubleshoot production issues through an API and live-scrolling web interface. Without requiring any configuration, developers can easily monitor metrics including container memory usage, HTTP request latency and application error rates.
PCF Metrics
PCF Dev—The free PCF Dev edition lets developers quickly prototype new applications and test new features on their local machine, before deploying the same application code to their production pipeline. This new laptop-sized environment hosts a core set of services and lightweight runtime in a single virtual machine, while still offering integrated logging, metrics, health monitoring and application compatibility with the full Pivotal Cloud Foundry platform.
Route Services—Development teams can now use extensible route services to standardize on solutions for common application needs like authorization, analytics, performance and security. This new class of marketplace service can be developed in-house or with third-party integrations like the new Apigee Edge API management service. Inserting services into the application request path makes it easy to, for example, quickly enhance an API gateway with rate limiting, metering and caching.
Context-Path Based Routing—The platform router can now redirect web and API traffic from any fully qualified domain name to multiple applications, based on the request context path. Because router management is fully self-service, this makes it easier for developers to incrementally provision and upgrade applications without customer downtime.
The new router functionality also simplifies the process of refactoring monolithic applications into smaller, independent services. For example, a single online store can be seamlessly split by context-path into three independent applications for storefront, products and orders:
Route
Application
store.shared-domain.com
Storefront
store.shared-domain.com/products
Products
store.shared-domain.com/orders
Orders
Context-path based routing also gives developers more control over the application upgrade process, by enabling them to deploy a new application version alongside the old one, then switch over visitor traffic on demand by remapping the application route.
Private Service Brokers—Developers can now rapidly create their own custom application services using private service brokers. This new broker type makes it easy to iterate on custom services in a private space before exposing them to other teams, without requiring a user with administrative permissions.
Role/Attribute Based Permissions—Customer applications and APIs secured via the Pivotal Single Sign-On service may now grant account permissions based on roles and attributes from external enterprise identity providers such as CA SiteMinder, Ping Identity and Active Directory.
Private Docker Registries—This release deepens our Docker integration by adding support for private Docker registries.
OPERATORS
White-Label Apps Manager—The web interface for managing applications now offers a new and responsive UI, written in React.JS, for easier client branding and white-labelling.
BOSH Addons & IPsec Encryption—Customers can meet specific security, anti-virus agent and compliance requirements with the new BOSH Addon framework. One of the first new global addons is IPsec encryption to secure network communications between VMs.
Ops Manager UAA Integration—Ops Manager assets are now protected by the central User Authorization and Authentication service to meet organizational security and credentials management policy. This enables user single sign-on from enterprise identity providers.
For even more detail on our latest release, including operational improvements and experimental features, head over to the 1.7 release notes.
Download Pivotal Cloud Foundry 1.7
Full Release Notes
Upgrade Guide