CLOUD Foundry is an open source cloud PaaS (platform as a service) where developers and organizations can build, deploy, run and scale their applications. It is the same company that manages Spring, hence has great support for running Spring based cloud applications.

For deploying an application in Cloud Foundry, we need to configure the application with a target and a space to deploy the application to.

It is increasingly GAINING popularity as an open source and lets US use our own tools and code. Organizations can deploy Cloud Foundry PaaS on their own internal infrastructure; on cloud PROVIDERS' infrastructure, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure.

It also provides a few out of the box components:

1. Authentication: Contains an OAuth2 server and login server for user identity management.
2. Application Lifecycle: Provides application deployment and management services.
3. Application Storage and Execution: It can control when an application starts and stops, as well as the VM's containers.
4. Service Brokers: Helps connecting applications to services like databases.
5. Messaging: Enables VMS to communicate via HTTP or HTTPS protocols, can also store data like application status.
6. Metrics and Logging. It provides Loggregator tool, which helps organizations monitor their Cloud Foundry environment.

It is very easy to set up and application on Cloud Foundry:

1. Create a pivotal Cloud Foundry account.
2. Create an organization and space to deploy the application.
3. Add the plugin with the configuration of Cloud Foundry org and space in application pom.xml/build.gradle.