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Cloud Foundry Springs Forth as First 'Open' PaaS
VMware today announced the debut of Cloud Foundry, which the company is touting as the first "open platform as a service," or PaaS.
Effectively, Cloud Foundry is VMware's platform for building applications that can be ported to the various public and private clouds, whether it's on VMware's or any other company's cloud infrastructure. VMware announced Cloud Foundry at a virtual live event originating from company headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif.
According to VMware, Cloud Foundry runs atop vSphere and vCloud but, true to its "openness," is able to run on top of other cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services and Google's AppEngine.
Cloud Foundry provides the ability for developers from a multitude of disciplines, including Spring for Java, Ruby on Rails, Sinatra for Ruby and Node.js (to name a few), to deliver applications to just about any platform attached to the cloud. VMware is getting support initially from MongoDB, MySQL and Redis on the database management end.
Developers can access Cloud Foundry in beta form for free in two ways: at VMware-hosted public cloud PaaS at www.CloudFoundry.com, where developers can test out application builds and deployments in the cloud; and as an open source project via an Apache 2 license at www.CloudFoundry.org. VMware also plans to make available later this quarter a Micro Cloud version that allows developers to build and test apps locally, as well as a commercial-grade version for enterprises and service providers.
Cloud Foundry is the result of acquisitions and joint development efforts that the company announced nearly a year ago, said VMware CTO Steve Herrod in a blog post. It started with VMware's initial purchase of SpringSource (for its application development family) in August 2009, followed eight months later by its acquisition of RabbitMQ (application messaging) and, another month later, of GemStone Systems (data grid technology).
During the webcast announcing Cloud Foundry, VMware did not announce pricing and licensing information on final release versions, or hint at a timeline for future announcements. The webcast is available for replay here.
About the Author
Michael Domingo has held several positions at 1105 Media, and is currently the editor in chief of Visual Studio Magazine.