VMware Cloud Foundry Now a Cloud-Agnostic PaaS Offering
It was mostly overshadowed by the glare of VMware’s blowout Q4 2011 earnings, but late last week the VMware Cloud Foundry team announced the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) had made a major stride forward — it no longer locks users into an underlying infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform underneath their Cloud Foundry deployment (usually Amazon Web Services). Now, it allows any app to work with any instance with any cloud provider.
Just write your app once and deploy to any Cloud Foundry instance, whether it’s with a public cloud service provider, a private cloud, a hybrid or even the super-small Cloud Foundry Micro, which runs in a virtual machine. The goal, according to the Cloud Foundry team’s blog entry, is to free developers from the shackles of “clouds that have a proprietary deployment and/or technology stack [that] will impede your cloud flexibility.” The endgame: Any app, any cloud, with Cloud Foundry making it possible.
For the technical nitty-gritty, I suggest taking a look at that same blog entry. But the takeaway here is Cloud Foundry has built a name for itself in the cloud ISV world by enabling deployment to OpenStack, Amazon Web Services or essentially any other cloud. And vendors such as AppFog and ActiveState Stackato have used Cloud Foundry as an, ahem, foundation for their own offerings, which means this move is likely to ripple across the entire PaaS market.
Cloud Foundry is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, a platform to watch in 2012. Keep coming back to TalkinCloud for updates.
