It has been nine months since we launched Cloud FoundryTM - the industry's first open platform as a service (aka PaaS). Cloud Foundry debuted with both the CloudFoundry.com service and as an open source project via CloudFoundry.org and we have seen a rich ecosystem of technology providers and service providers emerge around Cloud Foundry. Offering a choice of clouds, developer frameworks and application services, Cloud Foundry makes it faster and easier to build, deploy and scale applications.
We have made great progress on delivering developers a choice of frameworks and application services and now want to highlight the choice of both public and private clouds Cloud Foundry provides today.
Multi-Cloud - "Write Once, Cloud Anywhere"
As PaaS gains momentum, there will be more choices of cloud destinations. Some developers might want to keep the entire development and deployment within their organization's firewall; others may want to build internally and deploy via a hosted service, or vice versa.
As you make choices about cloud technology, one critical factor is whether you have a choice of clouds to which to deploy your applications. Ultimately, what many software developers want is an open PaaS environment with a choice of public, private and hybrid clouds for deployment.
When you build and deploy applications using Cloud Foundry's open architecture and open source availability you don't have to worry about being locked into a single cloud.
Why Multi-Cloud flexibility is so important?
- Managing your growth and changing needs over time - whether you want to run on private clouds or public clouds changes over time. Having the flexibility to add capacity or migrate to another cloud without re-writing your applications it is critical for long term success.
- Protecting against vendor lock-in - you don't want to be locked into a single cloud provider. You need to able to move between providers that suit your pricing needs or can offer better quality of service.
- Meet different compliance and geographical needs - you want to be able to pick and choose where you want to deploy your applications based on compliance requirements, data protection laws, latency constraints and more.
- Accommodate peak loads - being able to leverage a choice of public and private clouds to deal with "cloudbursting" scenarios means you have the ability to optimize your spending.
Cloud Foundry — Making Multi-Cloud a Reality Today
The Cloud Foundry ecosystem is growing quickly with increasing number of technology partners working with us to expand the choice of public cloud providers, private cloud distributions and cloud infrastructures. These partners, combined with simplicity and openness of the Cloud Foundry technology makes the vision of Multi-Cloud a practical reality .
With Cloud Foundry, moving your application to another cloud is very simple. Simply "target" your new cloud and "push" your application. No code or configuration changes required.
Looking at the Cloud Foundry command line tool ("vmc") it looks something like
vmc push myapp
The Cloud Foundry team has a blog post that further describes how Cloud Foundry's open architecture and tools enables a quick deployment of complex applications across multiple private and public destinations.
The blog includes a demo showcasing live deployment to five different cloud destinations running Cloud Foundry today without a single code or configuration change to the application.
2012 - The Year of PaaS While Avoiding "Cloud Lock-in"
As many suggest 2012 will be the "year of PaaS", a critical factor for success is the ability to deploy your PaaS-based application across a choice clouds, developer frameworks and application services. With Cloud Foundry, you don't have to worry about being locked into a single cloud.
For more information on Cloud Foundry please visit http://www.CloudFoundry.com