VMware (NYSE: VMW) and the Cloud Foundry Community have kicked off Cloud Foundry Core, a program aimed to ease cloud portability by providing a common capabilities baseline and an open mechanism to validate application portability. AppFog, Tier 3, Uhuru Software, Micro Cloud Foundry and CloudFoundry.com are now Core-compatible, according to a Cloud Foundry blog post.

Cloud portability refers to the ability to move applications and data from one cloud provider to another, including between public and private clouds. It’s important because the ability to respond to changing IT needs may be compromised — in terms of pricing, service, compliance, data protection and latency constraints — by being locked into a single cloud.

Cloud Foundry’s goal as an open platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is to make it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications, available through a variety of private and public clouds, including CloudFoundry.com.

“Cloud Foundry remains as committed as ever to Open PaaS and we appreciate the tremendous support from our ecosystem of partners and strong open source contributions from the developer community,” according to the Cloud Foundry blog. “Through Cloud Foundry Core we will continue to deliver on our commitment to preserve cloud application portability.”

The five Cloud Foundry Core compatible instances provide developers with deployment destination options:

In Cloud Foundry, the components of a PaaS offering that applications depend on (e.g. runtimes, messaging, data access) are built using open development frameworks and technologies (Java, Ruby, Node.js, MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Redis).