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Cloud Foundry, the open-source platform-as-a-service (PaaS) project, is now officially supported on Microsoft Azure, the Redmond, Wash., software maker and cloud services provider announced today.
Backed by IT heavyweights, including IBM, EMC and SAP, Cloud Foundry is an enterprise-grade software platform designed to help organizations develop, test and deploy scalable cloud applications faster. Befitting Microsoft’s cloud-inspired embrace of open-source technologies, Cloud Foundry on Azure is generally available, revealed Ning Kuang, a senior program manager for Microsoft Azure, offering customers a production-ready home for their workloads.
“With today’s announcement, developers can enjoy a consistent Cloud Foundry experience in Azure, and a simplified provisioning workflow by leveraging Azure Resource Manager templates,” she wrote in a Nov. 2 blog post. ‘By merging the Azure Cloud Provider Interface (CPI) into the upstream, open-source Cloud Foundry repository, Cloud Foundry on Azure is now powered by the Microsoft Azure team as well as the Cloud Foundry community.”
Azure customers can use Azure Resource manager to provision Cloud Foundry and the platform’s open-source management toolset, BOSH. The release also supports service broker integration along with all standard features, including availability sets and persistent disk snapshots, added Kuang. In addition, users can provision and manage virtual machines used for Cloud Foundry in Azure CPI.
It also opens the door for customers interested in running Cloud Foundry from VMware spinoff Pivotal. The commercial PaaS offering already supports Amazon Web Services (AWS) and OpenStack, and of course, VMware vCloud Air and vSphere.
“In addition to running Open Source Cloud Foundry, customers have an option of running Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Azure (preview),” stated Kuang. “Pivotal Cloud Foundry’s Cloud Native platform unifies the software delivery process with an integrated application framework, platform runtime and infrastructure automation for delivering software rapidly, consistently and reliably at scale.”
Coinciding with the Nov. 1 launch of Pivotal Cloud Foundry 1.6, Microsoft and Pivotal announced native support for .NET applications on the newly updated platform.
“Microsoft worked with Pivotal to support Pivotal Cloud Foundry in early access on Microsoft Azure for Linux based applications,” said John Gossman, corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure in a separate announcement. “With .NET support now also available for Pivotal Cloud Foundry, we’ve delivered a solution that enables agile developers to easily push all their apps (Windows or Linux) to a cloud-native platform on Microsoft Azure.”
For James Watters, vice president and general manager of Pivotal, the collaboration helps spur adoption among Microsoft’s enterprise customer base.
“The GA of Cloud Foundry on Azure is a major milestone for both the open-source community and our enterprise customers,” he said in a statement. “The demand for Azure was so high that we already have Fortune 100 customers building their next-generation applications with Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Azure.”
In addition to Azure support and running .NET workloads, Pivotal Cloud Foundry 1.6 ushers in Docker compatibility, integrated agile development tooling and the launch of Spring Cloud Services for microservices applications based on Netflix OSS (open-source software) and Spring Cloud.