VMware leverages its SpringSource acquisition to deliver Cloud Foundry, an open platform-as-a-service offering that spans the popular development paradigms, frameworks and languages, including Java, Ruby and more.
Capitalizing
on its 2009 acquisition of SpringSource, VMware has announced what it calls the
industry's first open platform as a service, known as Cloud Foundry.
Tod
Nielsen, co-president of Cloud Application Platform at VMware, told eWEEK that
Cloud Foundry represents a new generation of application platform, architected
specifically for cloud computing environments and delivered as a service from
enterprise data centers and public cloud service providers. Cloud Foundry
streamlines the development, delivery and operations of modern of applications,
significantly enhancing the ability of developers to deploy, run and scale
their applications in cloud environments while embracing the widest range of
public and private clouds, high productivity developer languages and frameworks
and application services.
"Cloud
Foundry is VMware's entry into PAAS," Nielsen said. "It's a delivery along our
open development strategy and it offers you a choice of clouds, frameworks and
application services."
As
part of the April 12 announcement, VMware is introducing a new VMware-operated
developer cloud service, a new open source PAAS project and a new "Micro-Cloud"
solution. VMware made the Cloud Foundry introduction on April 12 in Palo
Alto, Calif., at a live developer event led by VMware CEO Paul Maritz, as well
as: Rod Johnson, senior vice president of the SpringSource division of VMware;
Mark Lucovsky, a CTO at VMware; and Derek Collison, CTO and chief architect of
the Cloud Services Division at VMware; along with developer community leaders
Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, co-founders of Ajaxian; Ryan Dahl, creator of
Node.JS; Ian McFarland, vice president of technology at Pivotal Labs; Roger
Bodamer, 10Gen's steward of MongoDB; and Michael Crandell, CEO and co-founder
of RightScale.
"The
shift to cloud computing is driving large-scale, lasting change to the way
modern applications are built, deployed, operated and managed," Nielsen said in
a statement. "Sustained innovation in developer frameworks and
application services, the growing market of hybrid cloud environments and
greater demands to drive mobile, social and SAAS elements into mainstream
applications are all challenging enterprises and ISVs to continue to deliver
greater value, efficiently and at cloud scale. The introduction of Cloud
Foundry is a seminal moment for the market, intelligently bringing together
this dynamic environment via an open platform built and oriented specifically
for the demands of cloud computing."
PAAS
offerings have emerged as the modern solution to the changing nature of
applications, increasing developer efficiency, while intelligently linking
development frameworks and application services in an automated deployment
environment, VMware said. PAAS solutions promise to let developers focus
exclusively on writing applications, rather than configuring and patching
systems, maintaining middleware and physical machines and worrying about
network topologies.
Today's
early PAAS offerings, however, restrict developers to a specific development
framework, unique set of limited application services or an individual,
vendor-operated cloud service, VMware said. These unique, incompatible
platforms inhibit application portability, locking developers into a particular
offering and restricting movement of applications across cloud providers or
even into an enterprise's own data center.
Cloud Foundry extends VMware's commitment to Open PAAS,
delivering choice of the broadest set of development frameworks and languages,
heterogeneous application services and cloud deployment environments, said
Steve Herrod, VMware's chief technology officer. Cloud Foundry also delivers
the highest degree of portability, minimizing lock-in by enabling developers to
migrate applications between environments, across cloud providers and their own
data centers without disruption or modification to the application.
Rod
Johnson said Cloud Foundry delivers unique intelligence and automation required
to bring together heterogeneous application services and applications built in
multiple frameworks for seamless deployment across diverse cloud
infrastructures.
Initially, Cloud Foundry supports the most popular, high
productivity programming frameworks, including Spring for Java, Ruby on Rails,
Sinatra for Ruby and Node.js. And the project's open architecture will enable
additional programming frameworks to be rapidly supported in the future. For
critical application services, Cloud Foundry supports MongoDB, MySQL and Redis
databases as well as VMware vFabric services spanning cloud messaging, elastic
data management, load balancing and performance management.
Johnson points out that an obvious strength of Cloud
Foundry will be its Java support via Spring, but it is not just for Java. In a
blog post, Johnson said: "To date, there hasn't been a strong, open PAAS
destination for Java. The millions of Java developers have largely been left to
fend for themselves in the cloud, with weaker options than have been available,
to, say, Ruby developers. We're changing that."
Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.
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