On Cloud Configs

cf-deployment is developed against bbl. This allows us to delegate the particulars of the director's Cloud Config. However, cf-deployment does not require bbl.

This document discusses what cf-deployment requires of any Cloud Config intended to work with it. The discussion here is not exhaustive, and is not under test. Nonetheless, we intend it to support those wishing to use cf-deployment without bbl.

General Resources

The BOSH docs for Cloud Config are a great starting-place. You may find the CPI-specific cloud_properties references linked throughout to be useful.

bbl has fixtures for each bbl-supported IaaS. These can be useful examples. Anything cf-deployment draws from the Cloud Config will be present among these fixtures.

If you're having trouble with a specific question, please feel free to join the Cloud Foundry Slack, and ask us in the #cf-deployment channel.

We have some example cloud configs in this repository that may be useful as a starting point.

VM Types

cf-deployment uses three VM types. Here are their names and approximate resources:

• minimal: this is sufficient for most things. 1 vCPU and ~4 GB RAM
• small: our API instances can benefit from some additional resources. 2 vCPUs and ~8 GB RAM.
• small-highmem: diego cells need the memory to run apps. 4 vCPUs and ~32 GB RAM.

It is important to note that all of these have a 10 GB Ephemeral disk associated by default. cf-deployment has encountered issues in the past when attempting to use ephemeral disks smaller than that.

VM Extensions

We use VM Extensions to manage non-default ephemeral disk sizes and cloud_properties related to load balancing.

In particular, we generally require:

• 50GB_ephemeral_disk
• 100GB_ephemeral_disk
• cf-router-network-properties
• cf-tcp-router-network-properties
• diego-ssh-proxy-network-properties

While the disk extensions are straightforward, load balancing is one of the details that varies most between IaaSs, so this may be one of the trickier parts of writing your own Cloud Config.

On vSphere, which lacks load balancing, you can include the LB vm extension names without any cloud properties. You'll still have to solve load balancing, but this satisfies the manifest's need for these VM extensions.

Disk Types

cf-deployment requires the following disk types:

disk_types:
- disk_size: 5120
  name: 5GB
- disk_size: 10240
  name: 10GB
- disk_size: 102400
  name: 100GB

Networks

The network name default is used throughout cf-deployment. VMs on this network should be able to reach one another. If Cloud Foundry is expected to be able to reach the internet, this network will need some kind of NAT solution. For example:

• On GCP, we assign an ephemeral external IP to each instance.
• On AWS, we have a NAT box and a corresponding routing rule which sends internet-bound traffic to it.