BOSH

BOSH is an open-source software project that offers a toolchain for release engineering, software deployment and application lifecycle management of large-scale distributed services. The toolchain is made up of a server (the BOSH Director) and a command line tool. BOSH is typically used to package, deploy and manage cloud software. While BOSH was initially developed by VMware in 2010 to deploy Cloud Foundry PaaS, it can be used to deploy other software (such as Hadoop, RabbitMQ, or MySQL for instance). BOSH is designed to manage the whole lifecycle of large distributed systems. Since March 2016, BOSH can manage deployments on both Microsoft Windows and Linux servers. A BOSH Director communicates with a single Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider to manage the underlying networking and virtual machines (VMs) (or containers). Several IaaS providers are supported: Amazon Web Services EC2, Apache CloudStack, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack, and VMware vSphere. To help support more underlying IaaS providers, BOSH uses the concept of a Cloud Provider Interface (CPI). There is an implementation of the CPI for each of the IaaS providers listed above. Typically the CPI is used to deploy VMs, but it can be used to deploy containers as well.