A year has passed since VMware launched Cloud FoundryTM, a major milestone in our mission to "Simplify IT". We are focusing on simplifying application creation, deployment, and operations via an approach we call open platform as a service, or "Open PaaS" - an approach that gives developers choice as to where they deploy and run their applications.
Cloud Foundry debuted on April 12th 2011 as an open source project and has since garnered broad industry support, providing developers with a choice of frameworks, application services and multi-cloud deployment options. Cloud Foundry lets developers focus their energy on building applications while infrastructure is transparently delivered as a service.
We are celebrating Cloud Foundry's first birthday today at a live VMware event...and we have a lot to celebrate! We're announcing new partnerships, a new system for managing open source software contributions, new tools for operating large scale Cloud Foundry services and additional multi-cloud deployment choices. Slides from the event can be viewed here.
More Clouds
In one of my recent posts, I explained why preserving multi-cloud choice and flexibility is so important in the cloud era. Customers want to have the flexibility to move from a private cloud to a public cloud, from a public cloud to a private cloud or between public cloud providers, and not be locked into any particular cloud. As an open platform as a service, Cloud Foundry is designed to run on a wide variety of clouds and cloud infrastructure.
We sometimes say Cloud Foundry's goal is to be the "Linux of the cloud." Just as Linux provides a high degree of application portability across different hardware, Cloud Foundry provides a high level of application portability across different clouds and different cloud infrastructure. Developers don't want to have to rewrite their applications for every cloud and by virtue of its design and the fact it is open source, Cloud Foundry can be put on pretty much any cloud. Cloud Foundry can be deployed to almost any cloud infrastructure, including VMware's vCloud and vSphere, but also cloud infrastructure from Amazon Web Services, "bare metal", CloudStack, Eucalyptus, Nimbula and OpenStack.
At today's event we will give our audience a live demo, showing how Cloud Foundry makes multi-cloud a reality with the deployment of an application to four different Cloud Foundry-based clouds - all running on different cloud infrastructure, within minutes and without any code or configuration changes. It will be something along the lines of this:
More Code
Today VMware also introduced and open sourced Cloud Foundry BOSH, an open source tool chain for release engineering, deployment and life cycle management of large-scale distributed services.
BOSH is designed to enable the systematic and prescriptive evolution of services, and also facilitates the operation of production instances of Cloud Foundry. BOSH automates a variety of cloud infrastructure and allows targeted service updates with consistent results and minimal to no down time. It is proved in the course of operating CloudFoundry.com.
BOSH is available under an Apache license from CloudFoundry.org and includes support for VMware vSphere as well as early support for Amazon Web Services.
Additional technical details on BOSH are available in GitHub.
More Community
Cloud Foundry has been an open source project since the day it was released, and is also active on GitHub. Cloud Foundry has seen broad and substantive contributions from the developer community including support for dozens of major developer frameworks and application services.
Today we rolled out the new CloudFoundry.org, an updated source code management system for Cloud Foundry. The system converges Cloud Foundry source code to a single set of public code repositories on GitHub integrated with Gerrit for code reviews and Jenkins for continuous integration. The new process simplifies community code contributions, improves code quality and offers greater visibility into code changes as they happen.
More Partners
There are a broad range of companies investing in and around Cloud Foundry. The ecosystem around Cloud Foundry includes development and tools providers, cloud management vendors, public cloud operators, application service developers and ISVs. Here are some of the industry players currently investing in Cloud Foundry:
Today we're welcoming five new companies into the Cloud Foundry ecosystem:
- Cloud9's browser-based integrated development environment now supports deployment to CloudFoundry.com.
- Collabnet is making Cloud Foundry a core deployment platform for their suite of agile enterprise development tools.
- ServiceMesh has added policy-driven deployment and governance of Cloud Foundry to their enterprise Agility PlatformTM.
- SOASTA's CloudTest Lite® rapid test creation and real-time analytics now offers support for Cloud Foundry deployment targets.
- X.commerce, eBay's open, end-to-end commerce technology platform, is building upon Cloud Foundry.
Thank you!
VMware remains as committed as ever to Cloud Foundry and we appreciate the tremendous support Cloud Foundry has received from its ecosystem of partners and strong open source contributions from the developer community. We will continue to deliver on our Open PaaS strategy and ensure developers have multi-cloud choice, flexibility and new technology for operating ever larger, ever more reliable cloud and application services.
For more information on Cloud Foundry please visit http://www.CloudFoundry.com