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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..."
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.