VMware has entered the cloud game by offering an open-source package called Cloud Foundry, a Platform-as-a-Service that should strike fear in the hearts of its competitors, especially the likes of Salesforce.com, Microsoft and Rackspace. The platform will offer developers the tools to build out applications on public clouds, private clouds and anyplace else, whether the underlying server runs VMware or not. Like last week’s Open Compute Project from Facebook or Rackspace’s OpenStack effort, Cloud Foundry is a pretty big deal.
So What Exactly Is Cloud Foundry?
The goal of Cloud Foundry is to hide complexity from developers and make it easy to deploy and run applications anywhere. This is the same marketing speak that folks toting the cloud have pitched for years, but VMware wants to make it even more simple. Instead of worrying about instances or how to support a database, you just write a few lines of code, and Cloud Foundry makes it all happen for you. From day one, the platform will support Java thanks to VMware’s SpringSource buy back in 2009, Sinatra, Rails and node.js. However those wanting more frameworks and languages can build them, since the product is open-source.
Roger Bodamer, EVP Products and Technology at 10Gen — which supports the MongoDB NoSQL database – says it took about three months to integrate MongoDB with Cloud Foundry. 10gen is one of several launch partners that include RightScale, Joyent and Pivotal Labs.
