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."

Comments

Public/Private/Hybrid

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

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.

Press release

[Nimey]

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

So let me get this straight...

[GuruBuckaroo]

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...

Re:So let me get this straight...

[rosciol]

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.

Re:So let me get this straight...

[Rich0]

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.

Re:Yawn

[subreality]

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.

Re:uhmm

[BitZtream]

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?