Google has joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation as part of a continuing effort by the company to make its cloud platform more open.
The move caps a series of initiatives that Google launched with the Cloud Foundry community this year such as the delivery of BOSH Google CPI, a cloud software deployment and management tool and enabling Cloud Foundry on Google’s Compute Engine Platform.
“Collaborating with customers and partners as we’ve worked on these projects made the decision to join the Cloud Foundry Foundation simple,” said Brian Stevens, vice president of Google Cloud in a blog. “It’s an energized community with vast enterprise adoption,” he said. And the technical collaboration between members of the various teams involved in the Foundation has been notable, he added.
Cloud Foundry Foundation is a non-profit organization that was created last year to administer and manage the Cloud Foundry open source cloud-computing platform that VMWare originally developed. The Foundation’s 60-plus members include technology giants like IBM, Cisco, SAP, Accenture, Verizon, Citi and Fujitsu. With this week’s announcement, Google has joined the foundation as a Gold level member.
Cloud Foundry itself is a platform-as-a-service that is designed to let developers deploy and operate applications written in any of multiple supported programming languages and frameworks. One of the major appeals of the software is that it allows developers to deploy cloud applications without having to worry about the underlying web server or database.
The Cloud Foundry Foundation describes Cloud Foundry as open source software that enterprise can use to develop and run cloud apps on their own infrastructure or on an Infrastructure as a Service such as Amazon Web Services and OpenStack.
Cloud Foundry is optimized to remove the cost and complexity involved in configuring the underlying infrastructure for running cloud applications. “Developers can deploy their apps to Cloud Foundry using their existing tools and with zero modification to their code,” the Foundation claims.
As a member of the Foundation, Google will be part of a group that is responsible for driving adoption and awareness of the technology through collaborative development and marketing activities. It also means that developers will be able to use Cloud Foundry to deploy apps on Google’s Compute Engine cloud platform.
Google has said that it wants to make its cloud platform the most open environment as possible for developers and businesses. The company has taken several steps in recent months to follow through on this commitment.
In September for instance, Google updated its BigQuery fully managed data warehouse with support for Standard SQL. The company also added features that it said would improve BigQuery’s compatibility with more data tools than previously supported.
Google claims that its cloud platform now serves over 1 billion users, putting the service on par with other Google services like YouTube and Gmail. The company recently opened eight new Google Cloud Regions around the globe to meet the growing demand for the service. The new locations include Mumbai, London, Frankfurt, Singapore and Sydney. The company has committed to opening another nine regions next year.
