In a cloud computing world, preserving a choice of clouds is critical. The risks of being locked into a single cloud are substantial. Pricing, reliability, geographic location and compliance can all vary between clouds. Business requirements will evolve over time, necessitating the ability to move between clouds, whether public to private, private to public or between public cloud providers.

Cloud Foundry provides an abstraction layer for deploying and scaling applications and preserves the ability to move between clouds today and into the future. This protects applications from being locked into a specific cloud infrastructure or cloud provider.

Cloud Foundry Core defines a baseline of common capabilities to promote cloud portability across different instances of Cloud Foundry. Further, it provides an open mechanism that lets anyone instantly validate and confirm the specific frameworks and applications supported by a particular instance of Cloud Foundry and determine whether it supports Cloud Foundry Core.