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VMware Releases Open Source Cloud Foundry
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."
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..."
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.