about.html.md.erb

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title: What is BOSH?
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BOSH is a project that unifies release engineering, deployment, and lifecycle management of small and large-scale cloud software. BOSH can provision and deploy software over hundreds of VMs. It also performs monitoring, failure recovery, and software updates with zero-to-minimal downtime.

While BOSH was developed to deploy Cloud Foundry PaaS, it can also be used to deploy almost any other software (Hadoop, for instance). BOSH is particularly well-suited for large distributed systems. In addition BOSH supports multiple Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers like VMware vSphere, Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services EC2, and OpenStack. There is a Cloud Provider Interface (CPI) that enables users to extend BOSH to support additional IaaS providers such as Apache CloudStack and VirtualBox.

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Next: [What problems does BOSH solve?](problems.html)