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VMware Releases Open Source Cloud Foundry

Posted by samzenpus on from the silver-lining dept.

Julie188 writes "VMware shook the cloud world with an announcement that it was releasing an open source platform-as-a-service called Cloud Foundry. Not surprisingly, the new cloud platform takes direct aim at Microsoft's Azure and Google's Google Apps platforms. Cloud Foundry is made up of several technologies and products that VMware has acquired over the recent past and is released under an Apache 2 license. While VMware isn't the first-and-only player to launch an open source cloud initiative (Red Hat has DeltaCloud, Rackspace and Dell have OpenStack), some believe that with VMware now in the open source cloud business, pressure could be mounting for Microsoft and Google to release versions of their cloud that could be hosted somewhere other than their own data centers."

91 comments

  1. platform as a service? by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

    Bingo!

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    1. Re:platform as a service? by drb226 · · Score: 1

      Platform as a service? I'll paas.

    2. Re:platform as a service? by OeLeWaPpErKe · · Score: 1

      You know, they don't actually say what this does ... There's a webinar, but it's basically a commercial, you know the "this will change everything and Microsoft, Einstein and Jesus Christ were minor characters compared to what you're going to see on this webinar" type.

      So, anyone ? What does this do ?

      It seems it's for running spring applications ... wauw (!)

    3. Re:platform as a service? by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      It's apparently a server that you can rent, which may or may not be virtual. So why isn't it called something like [Virtual] server rental?

      I don't arrive at an airport and look for the local-roadcloud- transportation-vehicle-as-a-service desk.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    4. Re:platform as a service? by OeLeWaPpErKe · · Score: 1

      You don't answer the question at all

    5. Re:platform as a service? by jarlsberg71 · · Score: 1

      I wonder if there will be a legal battle against egg-dye and Platform as a Service?
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_as_a_service
      http://www.paaseastereggs.com/

      --
      E8B8B
    6. Re:platform as a service? by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      What question? Do you seriously not know what a server does, you stupid cunt?

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  2. Public/Private/Hybrid by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Run your whole public cloud infrastructure and application fabric on the same technology platform as you use to manage your internal data centre.

    This is a better by far option than Microsoft - who's idea is to land an Azure container at your doorstep. And it scales from the tiny to the gigantic.

    The heart of this stack seems to be gold old Tomcat. The path to an application layer that is aware of on-demand elasticity seems very good.

    --
    "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
    Never been known to fail..."
    1. Re:Public/Private/Hybrid by Belial6 · · Score: 1

      The trolls can come out at the name of "Lotus", but that is exactly what IBM offers with their cloud based Domino servers. Internal/External it's all the same.

    2. Re:Public/Private/Hybrid by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Run your whole public cloud infrastructure and application fabric on the same technology platform as you use to manage your internal data centre.

      This is a better by far option than Microsoft - who's idea is to land an Azure container at your doorstep.

      Clearly you haven't been paying attention to Microsoft over past few months. SCVMM 2012 is all about building hybrid clouds that span your datacenter and Microsoft's Azure services.

    3. Re:Public/Private/Hybrid by shis-ka-bob · · Score: 1

      I see this as the wholly Grail of cloud services. Cloud Foundry will be groovy.

      --
      Think global, act loco
  3. IKVM & Ruby... by Dzonatas · · Score: 0

    How many teams are there to port there platforms to .NET. I'd imagine IKVM & Ruby would start to get a head start. Given the other recent article about The Ceylon Project, is there any hope for cloudfactory?

  4. uhmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    why was Amazon not named in the summary? Who cares about Microsoft and who knew Google had a cloud offering.

    1. Re:uhmm by Singularity42 · · Score: 1

      Don't bother--I'm sure none of them would hire you anyway.

    2. Re:uhmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      At least I'm not afraid to apply.

    3. Re:uhmm by BitZtream · · Score: 4, Informative

      why was Amazon not named in the summary?

      Cause its more of a place to get access to extra CPU power cheaply for a period of time rather than a place to host services as their primary location since it is ridiculously overpriced compared to ... well everyone else? AWS may get used to host some services in their entirety for some companies other than Amazon, but not any smart ones. AWS is where you go when you want to run a massive set of number crunching or processing, or do a big release of something and utilize there content distribution network for a couple weeks until things get back to a level at which your standard hosting environment or datacenter can handle.

      Who cares about Microsoft

      Anyone more concerned about what using the right tools for the job at hand rather than being an ignorant flaming fanboy?

      and who knew Google had a cloud offering.

      Anyone who has been paying attention 'cloud computing' anytime within the last couple of years? And a ton of other developers who happen to use those cloud services for their own projects (rietveld, not google code), and all the companies who sell products running on Google's cloud (of which there are many) and all the companies which utilize products sold by companies using Google App Engine (of which there are more that probably anyone else other than AWS).

      Perhaps you should get a Cloud Clue before talking about it?

      --
      Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
  5. Cloud Foundry by HTH+NE1 · · Score: 1

    It runs on deuterium ore!

    --
    Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
  6. I must be old but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Why would anyone want to store their contents on a remote server where they are at the mercy of a third party. I could understand if they were selling home servers that allowed you to sync all of your appliances to a central server but... In the cloud. Just seems like it is time to ask

    What could possibly go wrong?

    1. Re:I must be old but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      there are benefits to not owning your own servers. Cost being the biggest one.

      Less labor costs, health care benefits, and retirement packages up front because someone else hires the monkeys to maintain the hardware. If you are a corporation, you have to pay taxes on all assets owned by the company. Not owning the hardware means less taxes to pay on assets. Less hardware also means less real estate you have to own to house that hardware, which in turn means less real estate taxes.

      the savings goes on and on...electricity, water, HVAC equipment, etc... If the cost benefit is big enough, risk of handing over the keys becomes less of an issue.

    2. Re:I must be old but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Got it. Outsourcing. That's worked well for us in the past.

    3. Re:I must be old but... by kiddygrinder · · Score: 1, Insightful

      it's different to outsourcing in that the idea is to give it to someone who has better facilities or can just manage servers flat out better, rather than just shovelling work off to someone who can do it cheaper. not every company should be running their own datacentre.

      --
      This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
    4. Re:I must be old but... by Belial6 · · Score: 1

      That makes no sense. The only reason that you wouldn't have just as good of facilities or can just manage servers flat out better internally is because you don't want to spend the money to make it happen. It absolutely IS shoveling work off to someone who can do it cheaper.

    5. Re:I must be old but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      risk and cost benefit. If you are a food company, IT isn't your main focus. If you can find a company that can do it better/cheaper than you, it may be better to source that task to someone else. You can 1) risk housing your data with someone thats REALLY good at IT service but doesn't care about your data as much you, or 2) Keep the data you care about in your own loving arms, but risk losing it anyway because you dont have the knowledge or resources to protect it.

    6. Re:I must be old but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That makes no sense. The only reason that you wouldn't have just as good of facilities or can just manage servers flat out better internally is because you don't want to spend the money to make it happen. It absolutely IS shoveling work off to someone who can do it cheaper.

      Let's think about this. I can build my own data center, or I could host my services with someone who's already sunk $10,000,000 into facilities and services and has dedicated staff to keep them in shape.

      "Shoveling work off to someone who can do it cheaper" isn't necessarily the wrong thing to do... nor is it necessarily going to give you worse services than you could have on your own, unless you're an idiot and go for the cheapest vendor without considering the nature or quality of services. Again -- how many separate backbone connections (and flywheel generators, and backup AC systems) can you afford; then, how many can someone for whom it's their whole business afford?

    7. Re:I must be old but... by turbidostato · · Score: 1

      "Why would anyone want to store their contents on a remote server where they are at the mercy of a third party."

      Why would anyone want to store their money virtualized and on a remote server where they are at the mercy of a third party?

      You will laugh at it, but that's exactly the proposition I heard about the other day. I think to remember the guy proposed to name his business offer "bank".

      Ha! good luck trying to convince people to pass control of their hard earned money away to a "bank". *That's* hard, not some bits and bytes.

    8. Re:I must be old but... by turbidostato · · Score: 1

      "it's different to outsourcing in that the idea is to give it to someone who has better facilities or can just manage servers flat out better"

      As in "oh, I wouldn't even think to outsource a service in order to give it to someone who has better facilities or can just manage the outsourced service flat out better"?

      "rather than just shovelling work off to someone who can do it cheaper."

      As in "oh, I wouldn't even think to move to the cloud just in order for my IT running cheaper"?

      "not every company should be running their own datacentre."

      Probably not. Last I checked that was what "managed services & infrastructure" was for.

    9. Re:I must be old but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That makes no sense. The only reason that you wouldn't have just as good of facilities or can just manage servers flat out better internally is because you don't want to spend the money to make it happen. It absolutely IS shoveling work off to someone who can do it cheaper.

      Really? How many companies do you know that can afford to build their own datacenter with redundant power, redundant backup generators, redundant internet connections, redundant environmental HVAC systems, 24x7 physical security, and have everything there replicated to a comparable datacenter in another part of the country? Sure, if you're in the Fortune 500 you can probably afford to do it AND staff it AND ensure that it all works are designed. But for the couple millions of other companies in the world it makes a lot more sense to host it somewhere else.

      On the other hand, you're a relatively small company and you're developing a web-based application or service you could easily write the code targeted for Cloud Foundry, EC2, Azure, etc, and quickly deploy a scalable cloud-based application to your customers while only paying for the processing time and storage capacity that you use. Instead of having to pay for an IT staff to build and maintain a sever infrastructure, you can pay to have it hosted on a highly redundant and scalable platform and use the cost savings to pay for more developers to improve the product. Or for that hot new car you wanted...

    10. Re:I must be old but... by Nikker · · Score: 1

      So are we talking about web hosting here? What kind of data would you really want running off of a wire anyway? Sure a small company that is centered around filling web orders from a site doesn't need a data center but they never really got one. Email? For under a couple thousand employees you can pick up a Unix admin some small rack servers and NAS to host file / email / backups for likely less than most mainframes (ooops meant 'cloud'). All cloud computing is, is a company that specializes in VM's. You call them up they spawn a VM and send it through the billing app once a month. You want some snazzy service no worries we will sell it to you it's just that we now hire the consultants to get it going and charge you the markup.

      --
      A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
    11. Re:I must be old but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I'm not sure if someone mentions it later, but the cost structure is an even bigger driver than most people realize. If you buy the servers and the software for them, that's classified as a capitalization expenditure, which means that only the depreciation of the asset can be deducted over time (most IT resources is 4 years). However, if you get the same thing as a service, it's fully deductible every year. Which means that cost-wise for the equipment, instead of a large upfront cost with many years to recoup the difference, you're getting it up front. For cash-strapped startups or even small and medium businesses, that's a huge deal.

      Another benefit for publicly-traded companies in the US is SOX-compliance. Move the data/services to the cloud and the data-retention issue is now the provider's problem, not the company's.

    12. Re:I must be old but... by cduffy · · Score: 2

      You call them up they spawn a VM and send it through the billing app once a month.

      Huh? Phone a human to spawn new machines? Monthly billing? That's missing the point.

      Billing resolution down to the minute, on the other hand, with fully automated management is actually taking good advantage of what's available -- if your load is spiky, maybe it's worth the markup to launch new machines based on current load (or pull underutilized systems out of the pool and shut them down) and pay for only what you use. ...and by the way, if you think you can hire a full-time UNIX admin and buy and host a rack full of 2Us for less than you'd pay a competitive cloud vendor (note, I said "competitive", not Amazon)... well, your idea of the numbers is waaaay off. I've played it both ways, and next time I'm doing a ground-floor startup, the last place I'll want to be is managing physical infrastructure.

    13. Re:I must be old but... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      It's so hard to do that most people are only willing to do it because the 'bank' is heavily regulated and all deposits are guaranteed by the government up to an amount larger than most people will put in the 'bank', so there's no real risk for typical users.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    14. Re:I must be old but... by gbjbaanb · · Score: 1

      you're forgetting the whole point of Cloud platforms.... a monthly subscription to store all your customer's data. Profit!!!!

      There's next to none in letting those pesky customers run their own clouds, I mean, apart from a licence to run a server and a few CALs, that's it. Pathetic - where will your corporate growth come from then?

      So basically VMWare is sticking it to Microsoft, again. Virtual PC used to be a licenced product until VMWare Server appeared for free. VMWare took virtualisation and made it a commonplace thing. Now it looks like they'll do the same for clouds.

    15. Re:I must be old but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Odd, I am willing to do it despite the bank being heavily regulated.

    16. Re:I must be old but... by overlordofmu · · Score: 1

      <sarcasm> I know! Why not do it yourself?!?! Take fuel for instance. All the companies that buy gas and diesel for their vehicles instead of drilling their own oil, refining it and transporting the refined fuel to their vehicle fleets themselves are just lazy. And those lazy jerks won't even cut down the tress and make paper themselves. Those punks go and buy paper made by someone else to stick in their printers. </sarcasm>
       
      Now do you see the logic?

    17. Re:I must be old but... by PybusJ · · Score: 1

      Yes, but it's more due to economy of scale rather than lack of willingness to invest. If you're setting up that server management infrastructure, better to split the cost across many users rather than one. You're no doubt negotiating better deals on your hardware too, and if you're a big provider with the flexibility to locate your data centre where power is cheap, even better.

      Where I work we are gradually moving from departments hosting their own servers in separate small server rooms or random cupboards and offices, to departments renting VMs from centrally provided infrastructure. This is specifically about investing the money to expand central facilities, saving money/power for the organisation as a whole, and providing more flexibility to users. As part of this we would like the flexibility to run VMs on our own machines or, if demand is high, to supplement that with external cloud capacity. It makes no sense to massively overprovision local facilities in case some service or project needs extra capacity in a hurry.

    18. Re:I must be old but... by Nikker · · Score: 1

      The main idea I'm getting at is that in reality how much responsibility are these cloud / mainframe operators going to take? What kind of services can they really manage? Will they not only host my email/web server but administer it as well? If they get hacked or suffer some kind of catastrophic failure can I hold them legally responsible? At the end of the day you're just renting bits and clocks. If your email is misconfigured will they fix it? Will they advise your services should be encrypted and take the steps necessary to ensure your company really is running the way it should? I really doubt it. Most companies want to offer as little as possible when it comes to responsibility. Enough startups or small companies set up shop thinking all they have to do is pay and they will get what they need are sorely mistaken but if you can prove otherwise I would be great full to hear what you have to say.

      --
      A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
    19. Re:I must be old but... by cduffy · · Score: 1

      So you're arguing not that there's anything wrong with cloud-based services, but that people who should be buying fully-managed services are instead buying cloud-based compute time, bandwidth and storage, paying their staff (or someone else) to set up the services they want on those images, and then forgetting that they need to keep paying said staff (or 3rd-party provider) to maintain what they just paid for?

      What stops someone from buying a bunch of colocated boxes, paying staff to configure them, and forgetting about those... and how is it different? (Can you "prove" that colocation services don't cause similar mistaken laxity?)

  7. Press release by Nimey · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The summary reads like a press release. "Shook the cloud world", indeed.

    --
    Hail Eris, full of mischief...

    E pluribus sanguinem
    1. Re:Press release by Raenex · · Score: 1

      The summary is just plagiarized from the article. I hope the guy who wrote that article at least got paid for his puffery.

    2. Re:Press release by mjwx · · Score: 1

      The summary reads like a press release. "Shook the cloud world", indeed.

      Several Goomba's knocked off floating platforms. Recovery efforts are under way.

      --
      Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
  8. Cloud shake by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "VMware shook the cloud world"

    Uh oh, a cloudshake!

    1. Re:Cloud shake by dunng808 · · Score: 1

      Are there tsunamis on Bespin? Imagine, homework swept away by tibanna gas.

      --

      Gary Dunn
      Open Slate Project

    2. Re:Cloud shake by gabereiser · · Score: 0

      Oh if I had mod points... thanks for that laugh..

  9. Don't bother applying for a job there by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The "We're Hiring" link is a simple mailto: with an invalid address. Someone please write a "cloud" joke around this...

          ----- Transcript of session follows ----- ... while talking to mail1.vmware.com.:
    >>> DATA
    : Recipient address rejected: User unknown
      in local recipient table
    550 5.1.1 ... User unknown
      554 Error: no valid recipients

  10. data data everywhere by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    yes. lets store our sensitive data somewhere in the world in the cloud. soon enough data will be leaked just like email addresses, SSN's, names, and other info like it has been happening in the last months.

    ill keep my private network and usb harddrives thank you.

    1. Re:data data everywhere by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      yes. lets store our sensitive data somewhere in the world in the cloud. soon enough data will be leaked just like email addresses, SSN's, names, and other info like it has been happening in the last months.

      ill keep my private network and usb harddrives thank you.

      I was pretty shocked at the number of people saying they backed up their data to remote services in the comments of a recent article.
      Maybe I'm just not trusting enough.

    2. Re:data data everywhere by zonky · · Score: 1

      Just encrypt the data on the way out.

  11. What happened to the 'internet' by exomondo · · Score: 1

    Was it too complicated a word so we needed to dumb it down to the picture used to represent it in network diagrams?!

  12. So let me get this straight... by GuruBuckaroo · · Score: 4, Funny

    We move all our department stuff into the Data Center. Consolidate all of our equipment into one spot, less field work, fewer techs.

    We move our Data Center into the Cloud. Less equipment in our Data Center, even fewer techs and admins, reclaim power cooling and space.

    Now we move the Cloud back into our Data Center? What's next, distribute our data center into the branches so it's disaster-tolerant?

    ... wait...

    --
    Poor means hoping the toothache goes away.
    1. Re:So let me get this straight... by rosciol · · Score: 5, Informative

      Not quite. This move is all about options and preventing the dreaded 'lockin'.

      Developers ask: If I bet my development on a single PaaS provider, won't I be tied to them indefinitely?
      VMware says: If you use our open source stack that can be hosted by us, or by you, you won't be tied to a particular framework or hosting provider. We'll happily host you if our service fits your needs but, if your needs outgrow us or we fail to meet your quality expectations, you can always run the exact same stack out of your own datacenter or someone else's.

      What remains to be seen is how good the performance is and how easy it is to use the platform.

    2. Re:So let me get this straight... by Rich0 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Well, a big thing in cloud providers is that there is no red tape in provisioning. I go to EC2, fill out a one-time form to set up an account (about as complicated as buying a pair of shoes on the site), and I just pick an image and tell it how many servers of what size to fire up, and in a few minutes I have a list of DNS addresses to ssh into.

      If I could have that at work it would be wonderful. Right now getting even a new virtual server seems to take forever. I'm all for resource accountability, but there is no reason provisioning should be so manual.

      I'd love to see something like this at work. And, of course it gives you the ability to send peak demand offsite easily.

    3. Re:So let me get this straight... by gbjbaanb · · Score: 1

      in the Corporate world it is even easier:

      I go to Amazon and fill in a form to set up an account, but first I need to get my boss to sign off on the purchase cose, and as its a recurring billing and cannot be explained under capital expenditure, he needs to get a sign off from his boss but it doesn't fall under his budget so he sends it to the MIS department for sign-off, but they don't see the need to run someone else's computers as they already provide server resources in a virtualised on-demand system but eventually we persuade them that it's a necessary business expenditure so they decide that they need to organise and 'own' the cloud systems but they like Microsoft products so they obtain an account for Azure which doesn't fulfill my needs, so I go to my boss and explain the need to run our own instance of a cloud account under Amazon but he still needs his boss to sign off on it as its a recurring subscription and he signs it off and sends it to corprate accounts who match it up with the already-authorised account that MIS arranged and reject it as an unnecessary duplication of resources, so I have to take it to the CIO who demands a report on what cloud computing is and why we need it, and after that we need to run a side-by-side comparison with MIS about the competitive differences between Azure and Amazon before he'll sign off on the need for the Amazon instance I originally wanted, but as he now understands the need for cloud provisioning, he contacts the MIS manager and orders him to start arranging cloud provision for the entire company, so he takes on the Amazon cloud as well as the Azure cloud which mean that now I need to fill out a form from MIS to provision my new cloud instances but as they have decided that Azure is the corporate standard, they insist that any Amazon provisioning needs sign-off from a manager so I take the form to my boss who signs off the Amazon request as necessary and MIS then sets up the image for me!

      What could be easier :)

    4. Re:So let me get this straight... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You're a patient man. If that level of BS was forced on me, I'd find a new company to work for.

    5. Re:So let me get this straight... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Exactly. VMware has a product for managing your internal/private cloud much in the same way. And because everything is built on their platform, you can move your application from internal to external and back very easily. And I'm not just talking about Cloud Foundry. There are many other cloud providers based on the VMware platform.

      *Yes, I work for VMware

    6. Re:So let me get this straight... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You're missing the point. Amazon has provisioning a new server down to a 5 minute process. Where I work, I've got to schedule weeks or even a month in advance to get onto the calendar of the guy who can provision a new VM for me. And that's after I've gone through the hassle of getting approval.

      I'd love to be able to spin up a new VM that's on the domain, in DNS, and has appropriate internal and external network access policies in 5 minutes in order to host some proof-of-concept work.

      In a private PaaS world, my department has a budget of X 'compute units'. I spend that budget with the approval of my boss, and if X is too small, it's his problem to get that budget raised.

    7. Re:So let me get this straight... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That was awesome.

      It's good to be reminded about the benefits of a small shop now and then.

    8. Re:So let me get this straight... by Rich0 · · Score: 1

      Oh, he understands that. His point was that his MIS department managed to turn a $20 EC2 bill into a six month ordeal.

      What I love about EC2 is that I can try something out for all of $5, and when I'm all done it just disappears. Or I can scale it up if I want to.

      I can't tell you how many times I would have loved to have a few test virtual machines at work on 5 minutes notice, use them for a week or two, and make the whole mess disappear, with no paperwork and just a $50 chargeback or whatever...

      At work they'd eventually provision something like the GP describes. It would be EC2, but at a price of $50/hr for a small instance.

    9. Re:So let me get this straight... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Awesome comment. I wish slashdot had facebook integration so I could "like" this comment. Or, at the least, a system to vote up and down comments, because this one needs to be voted up.

      Also, the mp3 option on the captcha prior to commenting seems like it might be insecure. Could be off on that one, just my instincts.

  13. Yawn by ugen · · Score: 2

    When is this "cloud everything" fad going to be over? It's a data center that someone else runs for you. Big deal. (Sure, when you put it that way - it does not sound nearly as cool and does not sell so well, does it)

    1. Re:Yawn by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      IAACP (I Am A Cloud Provider) : VMware VSPP, Microsoft SPLA, etc.

      Its not, and here's why... Technical people (like you and I along with the rest of /.) like terms that make sense. We mimic the Military sector. We gravitate towards terms like LINQ, VSS, and FCoE. They make sense to us and we can establish connections between the name and the definition. We hate when they overlap as the case is with Cisco IOS and Apple iOS.

      Regular people (users) do not understand these things and never will. I could say to a customer, "Please, consider allowing me to charge you for a enhanced secure multi-tenancy virtual private datacenter" though it will only create a thicker layer of glaze over their eyeballs. But for whatever reason, people (remember, users) somehow *get* the word Cloud. They understand that term and can connect it to what they've read about it in CIO magazine.

      So yes, we say it because it sells. It sells because it helps people make a connection. We are somewhat stuck in this perpetual and seemingly endless cycle between providers and customers and end users,. Some try to split it up into Private/Public or classify it as IaaS/Paas/etc, but at the end of the day only one word will continue to stand out:

      Cloud

    2. Re:Yawn by seifried · · Score: 1

      When is this "Electrical company" fad going to be over? Trusting someone to run a large scale electrical grid is insane, everyone will keep generating their own electricity! Computing power, storage and bandwidth is becoming a commodity, "cloud" is just a fancy word for infrastructure/commoditization (well and some other issues like elasticity, etc.).

    3. Re:Yawn by farnsworth · · Score: 1

      When is this "cloud everything" fad going to be over? It's a data center that someone else runs for you. Big deal. (Sure, when you put it that way - it does not sound nearly as cool and does not sell so well, does it)

      Cloud computing is not a fad and it's not "a data center that someone else runs for you". It's a way to use resources using strategies that have emerged and become feasible only recently. Google, Amazon, and others have been running giant internal clouds for years, and recently have begun renting them out. For most folks, using these third-party off-site infrastructures is the best way to go. For others, it doesn't work but they don't have the in-house expertise or time/money/focus to roll their own. This is where VMware and Rackspace and Redhat come in -- they give you a simple way to create your own internal setup.

      --

      There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.

    4. Re:Yawn by subreality · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's a data center that someone else runs for you. Big deal.

      Said like someone who's never had to deal with a data center before. In the small to mid-size business range, running a data center seriously sucks. It involves at least one of: talent and capital that small businesses just don't have; renting a cage from someone who's charging an arm and a leg for mediocre service; or simply building a poor one in what used to be a conference room and dealing with crap power, cooling, cabling, etc, because those hassles are still cheaper than either of the two prior options.

      Hassle-free sign up for what you need as you need it with no lock-in is a SMB's dream come true. I don't think it's going away.

    5. Re:Yawn by nbossett · · Score: 1

      For now, centralizing computing resources in "the cloud" doesn't have the same obvious and conclusive upper hand in the vast majority of common uses that centralized electricity generation does. Some fundamental shift in economics of power generation (such as extremely cheap and durable solar panels) might change the situation, but that hasn't happened yet. For comparison, lots of individuals and businesses at all size levels find local computing resources to be the best solution for them. Even massive consumers of electricity don't generally choose to build and operate their own power plants.

    6. Re:Yawn by kdsible · · Score: 0

      Double yawn!!

    7. Re:Yawn by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's a data center that someone else runs for you. Big deal. (Sure, when you put it that way - it does not sound nearly as cool and does not sell so well, does it)

      It's not, it's much more than that. It's about writing applications on a standardized framework that can be rapidly deployed and scaled as needs dictate, while only paying for the compute and storage resources that you use. Oh yeah...and you get all of the fault tolerance and high availability that you want, along with geographic redundancy. It's about getting capabilities that most companies cannot afford to implement on their own at price points that are lower than what they already pay for the comparably limited capabilities that they have today.

      I used to think the same way you do, until I started looking into it.

    8. Re:Yawn by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      When is this "cloud everything" fad going to be over? It's a data center that someone else runs for you. Big deal. (Sure, when you put it that way - it does not sound nearly as cool and does not sell so well, does it)

      What are you talking about? The cloud computing paradigm can proactively empower entreprise frameworks by allowing them to leverage the dynamic nature of interconnected networks and thereby benefit from greater synergy. Imagine the possibilities!

    9. Re:Yawn by rahvin112 · · Score: 1

      It's the whole reason Amazon's service has been so popular. A pay as you go for only the services you need that you can fully customize. What VMWare is doing is offering an abstraction layer that allows you to do essentially the same thing at any data provider. This should make it possible to have an Amazon type service at every data center which will drive down costs and help everyone in the industry.

      Also VMWare will make some money on it no doubt.

    10. Re:Yawn by seifried · · Score: 2

      For now, centralizing computing resources in "the cloud" doesn't have the same obvious and conclusive upper hand in the vast majority of common uses that centralized electricity generation does.

      It's rapidly happening. You want to do some computing, you can either build a compute farm/etc. (and a server room/building, cooling, electrical, etc, etc.) or just run it on EC2 (which means setting up some non trivial software to handle firing up all the images, monitoring them and their results, setting up storage, etc.), or better yet outsource the whole mess to Cycle Computing (which in turn uses EC2, but handles all the setup/etc. which is non trivial). Compare Cycle Computing at $1,060 an hour (for 10,000 compute cores) and they handle EVERYTHING vs. doing it yourself. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/06/cycle_computing_hpc_cloud/. Plus you need to remember tax wise operational expenditures are often preferred over capital expenditures, and if your compute farm isn't computing it's a waste of hardware, whereas on EC2 you can provision a ton of systems for the hours or days you need them and then turn them off and stop paying.

    11. Re:Yawn by ugen · · Score: 1

      I think you missed my point (as did most readers, which is unfortunate, this being /.).

      The "fad" is not in the data center as a concept, that's something that exists and surely will continue. Much like electric company, though - all it is is a *utility*. It's necessary, technically complex but not at all exciting and not particularly special.

      The *fad* is calling a data center by a mysteriously sounding and sales-created name in order to give it a different "feel" and generally sell more services, sometimes to those who otherwise would not have done so. Kinda like calling electric utility a "life energy source" or some such :)

    12. Re:Yawn by petermgreen · · Score: 1

      Another big difference is that small scale electricty generation has high running costs and swithing between two sources of electricty can be done very quickly after the initial source fails. This means that even if you find the centralised provider too unreliable on their own it STILL makes sense to use them most of the time and only use your local generation as a backup.

      With computing if you need the resources locally some of them time (say because your internet connection is unreliable) it makes sense to have them local all the time rather than try to implement some kind of automatic switch when your internet connection goes down.

      --
      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
    13. Re:Yawn by mrpolyrhythm · · Score: 1

      I agree with you on that. Cloud this, cloud that. It's a little tiresome. I have accepted that this is just how its being referred to now, and it doesn't appear to be slowing down, in fact just the opposite. The funny thing is when people make reference to the cloud without really knowing what the cloud is. Like those commercials crying out "To the cloud" when the end user is just RDP'ing to their home desktop. What cloud are you using there? The internet? Oh right. The internet is always pictured as a cloud on network diagrams. :)

    14. Re:Yawn by subreality · · Score: 1

      I hate it when they try to hype an old service with a new name, but I don't think that's the case here. Hosted storage and dropping your infrastructure into VPSes is a fairly recent idea, and the "cloud" term didn't come along much later. It's a new term that's reasonably descriptive of a new thing. Do you object to the trendy marketing term "cell phone" even though they're really just multi-base multiplexed radiotelephones?

      Who do you think is being upsold? I can't envision a buyer who didn't really want a colo server who's going to get screwed because they were lured in by the term "cloud".

  14. timebomb by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    since it's opensourced I guess there will be not a time bomb this time around

  15. Google Apps or Google App Engine? by forevermore · · Score: 1

    Bit of a difference there...

    --
    Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
  16. Cloud... foundry? by lennier · · Score: 1

    Sounds like something that would go down like a lead balloon.

    Do people even think before smashing words together? We must contraincentivise such dysutilization of Engspeak.

    --
    You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
  17. Op Ex. versus Cap Ex by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I know this sounds like buzzword bingo, but the real difference here is that the outsourcing allows a company to avoid a capital expenditure (buying and building datacenter) with operating expenditure (paying a service provider). The executives love this because it allows them to do all the short-term thinking and profit analysis they get rewarded for: reduce outflow today, get more business and revenue, and ignore the longer term amortized costs. It also allows tax games, depending on the accounting models and tax loopholes in the company's industry. E.g. it may sometimes be easier to write off operating expenses than handle depreciation of capital expenses.

    1. Re:Op Ex. versus Cap Ex by zippthorne · · Score: 1

      It's not just short-term thinking. It actually makes sense not to be an omnibus company. Do the thing that you do, do it well, and pay other people do do the stuff that needs to be done to allow you to do the thing you do. The thing you're actually interested in.

      No man is an island, entire of itself, and few companies are either.

      --
      Can you be Even More Awesome?!
    2. Re:Op Ex. versus Cap Ex by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      There's also the advantage of specialisation. Hosting 1 server is expensive. Hosting 10 servers costs about the same amount. Hosting 1,000 servers costs a lot less per server than hosting 10. There's no way that I could even get an Internet connection with the kind of throughput that a typical colo company offers for even the price of hosting, and that's ignoring the cost of power, the cost of the space, and so on. With a VPS it's even bigger. A lot of small companies only need 10% of a machine, but hosting that themselves would cost much more than renting it.

      At some point, it becomes cheaper to move it in house. If you're a big company, then it definitely makes a lot of sense to host your own infrastructure.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  18. An alternative by rsax · · Score: 1

    You can do something similar with Amazon Web Services and/or Eucalyptus.

    1. Re:An alternative by intiha · · Score: 1

      You can do something similar with Amazon Web Services and/or Eucalyptus.

      Yeah, that was what I was thinking. How is what VMWare now offering different from just deploying an Eucalyptus enterprise cloud? In other words, why is this a "game-changer" as the OP said?

    2. Re:An alternative by Full+Metal+Jackass · · Score: 1

      You can do something similar with Amazon Web Services and/or Eucalyptus [eucalyptus.com].

      No you can't. This is a layer of the stack above AWS or Eucalyptus. In fact those are two of the target platforms for this.

      Those two give you an API for creating and destroying Virtual Machine instances. This leverages that ability to provide a scalable deployment stack for your applications. If you want to understand what it's about watch the videos on the site. Alternatively, have a look at http://heroku.com./ It's the same as that but it supports more languages/frameworks and it's open-source.

  19. I need to get this out of my system... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The current climate of moving everything to "The Cloud" seems to be the prevailing condition. Now, I don't wish to be precipitate, but there would seem to be a storm brewing on the horizon.

    Firstly, the definition of "The Cloud" is somewhat nebulous. This leaves us in a bit of a fog when it comes to condensing the various aspects into a simple definition. Although things are always a bit overcast with any new technology, there would seem to be a much increased chance of vapourware.

    Secondly, despite the admitted difficulty in peering through the mist shrouding the future, the forecast is unclear on how well such systems will weather with age. More specificaly, there seems to be little consideration for the Butterfly Effect of virtualizing so much infrastructure containing so many interconnected layers of technology.

    I apologize for this rather gloomy outlook; it is certainly not my intention to rain on anyone's parade; but I feel the atmosphere is not suitable for proceeding full steam ahead. However, if you're looking for a ray of sunlight, there is a silver lining to be found.

    Quite simply, it should teach us the value of "Blue Sky" thinking.

  20. Say what you want, this is a good thing by rzei · · Score: 1

    I'm not a fan of cloud buzzword, but could slashdotters take a second to read that this code has been released on APL license? APL license, you know, apache?

    This is a great development and its nice to see what the buying of SpringSource has already put in motion in VMWare. As pointed by others, this will be a good competitor to GAE, AWS and to whatever Microsoft is pushing.

    Even I might be interested in this, in private cloud sense at least; perhaps it would be the easiest way to horizontally scale our software. We'll see.

  21. I will always need a hardware rack in the office by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    As a small business, the only things keeping me away from the cloud is:

    1) I still need to backup - I want those backups in my hands. It is my data. It is my clients data. They trust me NOT you. No insurance company insures data loss. There is a reason for that.

    2) If for some reason the internet connection drops (It happens - cables cut in the street etc..) I need my workers to still be able to work, use software,
    sends commits to our internal development repository, use the fileserver, write bills to clients via CRM etc.. It costs to keep people sitting around doing nothing.

    We may work with the internet but we are not internet dependant.

    I see the cloud more of a method to distribute internet based online services, NOT a method to rely on for the *everyday* concerns of a business.
    So I will *always* need a hardware rack in the office, and someone to maintain it.

    Start-ups (if they survive) will eventually turn into normal businesses and will figure out the same thing.
    It is just the cost of doing business, and it should not be a major issue to look after the tools you need to work.

    If it is so good, tell Google, Microsoft, VMWare, Amazon etc.. to outsource all their servers needs to a third party and eat their own dog food.

    my2c

  22. Not correct: the beta is free, not the release by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The article is incorrect: only the beta is free :

    "The VMware operated and managed CloudFoundry.com is in beta and can be accessed for free. Users of the beta service will be notified regarding the end of beta phase and onset of commercial service. The pricing of commercial service is not being announced as of now."

    http://cloudfoundry.com/faq

     

  23. You already can host Azure cloud locally by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Ummm too late.
    http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization/en/us/private-cloud.aspx

  24. Botnet cloud? by Tijaska · · Score: 1

    Here's an idea for the new cloud entrepreneurs. Cultivate a botnet of 100K+ compromised PCs, then sell their spare cycles.

  25. Anybody using these? by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 1

    First I heard about DeltaCloud ... guess I'm out of it? OpenStack has been well-publicized.

    Has anybody here deployed one or the other? It seems likely that libvirt should eventually treat them all agnostically.

    The dream is to be able to move stuff in-house and out as needs change without worrying about deployment location or type too much beyond capabilities and cost.

    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
    OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  26. Dogfood by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    http://cloudfoundry.com/ is blocked on EMC's intranet. Employees such as myself cannot access it. /facepalm