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NFJS2025

Cloud Foundry Deep Dive, Part 4: Custom Buildpacks and Data Services

One of the most powerful features of Cloud Foundry is its extensibility. Cloud Foundry has two primary extension points:

1) Buildpacks - by following the buildpack model first popularized by Heroku, the Cloud Foundry platform was designed to be application runtime agnostic, and the platform provides the same services to an application regardless of it being implemented using Java and Spring, Ruby and Rails, JavaScript and Node.js, or any other language/framework combination. Cloud Foundry users can easily implement their own buildpacks by following a specification that exposes three basic scripting endpoints.

2) Services - the Cloud Foundry platform exposes to developers a consistent user experience for external service interaction through the idea of “creating” and “binding” services. This is easiest to see through the idea of first “creating” a database and user role within an existing PostgreSQL or MySQL cluster and then “binding” the proper credentials to my application's environment so that I can connect to and consume that database instance. This is made possible by the Cloud Foundry service broker API, a set of REST endpoints that are consumed by the Cloud Foundry Cloud Controller to orchestrate the necessary steps for a given service.

In this session we'll learn how to:

  • use Heroku buildpacks on Cloud Foundry
  • use Cloud Foundry buildpacks on Heroku
  • customize existing buildpacks
  • author new custom buildpacks
  • create service brokers
  • deploy service brokers
  • test service brokers

Matt Stine

About Matt Stine

My passion is taking a metaphysical approach to software engineering: what is the nature of the collaborative game that we continuously play, and are there better, more contextually-aware ways to play that game?

By day I lead a team tasked with taking a first-principles-centric approach to intentionally enabling programming language usage at the largest bank in the United States.

By night I write and teach my way through a masterclass in software engineering and architecture targeting early-career software engineers working in large-scale enterprise technology organizations.

What is the primary goal?

To win the game. More seriously: to get 1% better every day at providing business value through software.

Who am I?

I'm a 22-year veteran of the enterprise software industry. I've played almost every role I can imagine:

  • Software Engineer
  • Software Architect
  • Technical Lead
  • Engineering Manager
  • Consultant
  • Product Manager
  • Field CTO
  • Developer Advocate
  • Conference Speaker
  • Author
  • Technical Trainer
  • Technical Marketer
  • Site Reliability Engineer
  • Desktop Support Specialist

I've worked at Fortune 500 companies, a tenacious teal cloud startup, and a not-for-profit children's hospital. I've written a book, and I've hosted a podcast. I've learned a lot along the way, including many things I wish I'd known when I first got started. And so now I want to pass those learnings on to you, especially if you've only just begun your career.

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