How does Cloud Foundry compare to Azure or AWS?

Question

I am a bit confused about Cloud Foundry and how it relates to Azure or AWS.

Their website reads, "Create Apps, Not the Platform". My overall understanding is that Cloud Foundry is installed on top of Azure or AWS and provides an abstraction layer to make it easier to manage Azure or AWS' IaaS. So in other words it's a competing product to Azure and AWS' PaaS.

Is my understanding correct?

Answer 1

Yes, your understanding is correct.

Cloud Foundry (CF) is an open source platform for hosting cloud native applications. When running applications on CF you only have to manage your applications and data and CF takes care of the rest. At the same time it allows you to choose your underlying infrastructure, be it AWS, Azure, Openstack or you own. It allows you flexibility on changing the underlying IaaS as you please.

The Cloud Foundry platform itself has many implementations and certified providers include Pivotal, IBM, Atos and SAP.

In short, Cloud Foundry is a language agnostic, multi-vendor, multi-cloud environment for running cloud native applications.