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.

A BOSH package details the necessary source code, binary assets (called “blobs”), and compilation scripts for building a given software component.

BOSH packages are always subject to a compilation phase, even if this just extracts files from an archive and copies them to the proper target directory.

In most cases, users don't work with deployment manifest as one big YAML file.

These separate files are merged by tools like spiff or spruce, right before they get uploaded to the BOSH server and deployed.

Different jobs can refer to configuration properties with same name, in order to share common settings.

Additionally, BOSH provides a way to capture the root filesystems that will be the basis of deployed instances (VMs or containers), as single images called “stemcells”.

Reproducibility The ability to integrate source, third party components, data, and deployment externals of a software system in order to guarantee operational stability.

BOSH tool chain provides a centralized server for operating the deployed systems.

Consistency The mission to provide a stable framework for development, deployment, audit, and accountability for software components.

Moreover, audit and accountability are provided by the BOSH server, which allows users to see and track changes made to the deployed systems.

BOSH tool chain integrates well with current best practices of software engineering (including Continuous Delivery) by providing ways to easily create software releases in an automated way and to update complex deployed systems with simple commands.

Designed to address shortcomings found in available tools to manage Cloud Foundry.

BOSH connects to the underlying IaaS layer through an abstraction called the CPI (Cloud Provider Interface).

Some community maintained CPIs exist for Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure and CloudStack.

Once a sub-component of Cloud Foundry, BOSH is now a separate open source project, that aims at deploying any distributed software.

Announced public users of BOSH and PCF include Axel Springer, Corelogic, IBM, Monsanto, Philips, SAP, and Swisscom.