Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) is a cloud-native and open-source technology platform used to deploy next-generation applications. It is a distributed system with many components that play different roles in the process of providing the underlying infrastructure and environments that organizations need to facilitate the continuous delivery of software updates, manage the application life cycle, and streamline the development, deployment, and scaling of web-based applications. PCF uses containers, and the main purpose of PCF is to improve the efficiency and speed with which organizations build, deploy, and operate software.

PCF is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, which means that it provides a complete platform for developing, deploying, and managing applications. With PCF, developers can focus on building their applications, and the platform takes care of the underlying infrastructure. PCF speeds up software delivery and makes it easy to scale underlying application infrastructure with a growing base of users. It is highly automated, easy to install, and runs on any public or private cloud.

PCF supports the full development lifecycle of a container-based architecture, and development teams turn to PCF for deploying applications or services with the flexibility to jump from one cloud service to another. Developers can easily shift workloads between cloud platforms with no application or code changes. PCF offers numerous benefits for enterprises, including faster development iteration, improved efficiency with IT Operations management (ITOM), easy portability with applications, greater developer productivity, high availability, health management for applications, centralized platform administration, seamless cloud platform usage, dynamic routing, and increased time-to-production.