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cloudfoundry
bosh
Ruby2012–2017
cloudfoundry / bosh

bosh

Cloud Foundry BOSH is an open source tool chain for release engineering, deployment and lifecycle management of large scale distributed services.

Systems & InfrastructureScience & EngineeringDevOps & Cloud
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
4Distinct people
6Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2.1KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Cloud Foundry BOSH is an open source tool chain for release engineering, deployment and lifecycle management of large scale distributed services.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year6 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2012-04-13 02:38:00 UTC to 2017-11-29 20:48:18 UTC.

01232012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments20122013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments20142015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2017

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

6 sources
eropple·Nov 29, 2017
Terraform requires significant infrastructure to get the same state management and implicit on-device access that CloudFormation's metadata service does. A common pattern in systems I oversee or consult on is to use CloudFormation's metadata service (which is not the EC2 metadata service, to be clear) to feed Ansible facts or chef-zero attributes in order to have bootstrapped systems that do not rely upon having a Tower or Chef Server in my environment. The Terraform domain spec is not sufficiently expressive (just look at the circumlocutions you need to not create something in one environment versus another). It's way too hard to build large modules, but the lack of decent scoping makes assembling many small modules difficult too. Worse, the domain spec is also requires HCL, which is awful, or JSON, which is a return to the same problem
Read the rest
that cfer solves for CloudFormation. One of my first attempts at a nontrivial open-source project was Terraframe[1], a Ruby DSL for Terraform; I abandoned it out of frustration when it became evident that Terraform's JSON parsing was untested, broken, and unusable in practice. Out of that frustration grew my own early CloudFormation prototypes, which my friend Sean did better with cfer. If you're looking for an alternative to CloudFormation, I generally recommend BOSH[2], as it solves problems without introducing new ones. Saying the same for Terraform is a stretch. [1] - https://github.com/eropple/terraframe [2] - https://github.com/cloudfoundry/bosh
In AWS Fargate – Run Containers Without Managing Infrastructure
jacques_chester·Dec 28, 2014
> Is there a tool that would let me describe the infrastructure and deploy it on a given cloud provider but also have the ability to deploy the same infrastructure on my local machine (using VMs/docker) for development purposes. Depending on your concept of "deploy", I can point you to two options, both produced by the company I work for. If you think in terms of controlling from the VM up, look at BOSH[1]. It's an IaaS deployment / management / update tool which has been used in production for several years. You create two yaml files: a release manifest (describing the software components of your system) and a deployment manifest (describing the computers and networks of your system and how to map components to them). This separation means that a single release manifest can be applied to many different actual deployments. At my day job I
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deploy a large PaaS release into a single virtual machine. My colleagues deploy exactly the same release into AWS with thousands of machines. Systems defined using BOSH can be deployed to AWS, vSphere, OpenStack or Warden (a containerisation system). For local development, the Warden backend enables "BOSH lite"[2] -- releasing and deploying into a virtual machine that hosts a local cloud of containers. If you want to go the next level up to a proper PaaS, you can try Cloud Foundry[3]. It's defined as a BOSH release[4], which is how at my day job my co-workers and I are able to work both locally and at scale on identical software. In Cloud Foundry we distinguish between stateless (apps) and stateful (services) software, and we provide a simple way to connect them. The easiest way to play with it is to log into Pivotal Web Services. IBM Bluemix is the same software and is also open to the public. So for example, with Cloud Foundry, if you want ten copies of your app, you do this: $ cf scale my_app -i 10 And it'll be scaled up to 10 instances. Need more RAM? $ cf scale my_app -m 2G Now each node gets 2Gb. And so on. [1] https://github.com/cloudfoundry/bosh [2] https://github.com/cloudfoundry/bosh-lite [3] http://docs.cloudfoundry.org/ [4] https://github.com/cloudfoundry/cf-release
In Microservices – Not a free lunch
jacques_chester·Dec 3, 2014
> It would also suggest that the level above that is abstracting datacenter's away to just manage a single global system made up of multiple DC's. I work on Cloud Foundry. We already have this tool, at least for the IaaS layer. It's called BOSH[1], and it allows no-downtime deploys and updates of very large PaaSes (such as our own Pivotal Web Services). In our reference Cloud Foundry configuration, cf-release[2], we define a deployment manifest that can install a Cloud Foundry instance that spans two AWS availability zones. We dogfood this system every week. Sometimes twice per week. Our entire Pivotal Web Services system is updated, live, online. And basically, it's very rare that anyone notices. Which is awesome. [1] https://github.com/cloudfoundry/bosh [2] https://github.com/cloudfoundry/cf-release
In Why Docker and CoreOS’ split was predictable
jacques_chester·Sep 26, 2014
> And we'd love to have build in support (or at least a common standard or best practices) for orchestration. Look into BOSH[0][1]. It's a IaaS orchestrator that works for multiple cloud backends -- AWS, openstack, warden and vsphere out of the box. I use it in my day job. It's already been applied to working with Docker containers.[2] [0] https://github.com/cloudfoundry/bosh [1] http://docs.cloudfoundry.org/bosh/ [1] http://blog.pivotal.io/cloud-foundry-pivotal/products/managi...
In Docker is the Heroku Killer

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