VMware’s Cloud Foundary

I just signed up for the VMware Cloud Foundary Beta, watched the developer videos, and I’m already impressed.

Cloud Foundary is “The Open Platform as a Service (PaaS)”.  Their definition of ‘cloud’ is somewhat different than a lot of  vendors.  Their cloud can be “on your laptop on an airplane” or behind a firewall, for example.  Anyone that has wanted to work locally with AWS will tell you that this is just plain smart.  “You had me at, Hello”.  They actually say during the webinar, “our cloud started on our laptops”.

Frameworks supported out of the box include Spring, Rails and Node.js.  You can deploy from your IDE or from the command line.

VMware has a great team working on this infrastructure (ex-Microsoft, Google, etc.).  The big focus was on removing the “Antiquated Middleware Stack”… “the middle of the sandwich is quite stale”: complex, distracting, and hasn’t kept pace with innovation.  They’ve clearly done that.

As announced on SpringSource.org, Cloud Foundary is:

• Open to multiple framework and developer communities including Spring, Grails, Node.js and Ruby on Rails.
• Open to multiple services including basic services such as a relational database as well as broader choices like Redis and MongoDB, and RabbitMQ.
• Open to a choice of underlying deployment destinations including a public cloud service at CloudFoundry.com as well as the capability to run on top of EC2 and other IaaS offerings.

But does it work with RightScale?  It sure sounds like it.  Here’s a quote:

“Running Cloud Foundry on RightScale combines easy onboarding of applications with the power of flexible, customizable cloud deployment and management. With Cloud Foundry’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) model, VMware is developing an ideal environment for developers by streamlining the getting-started experience and delivering that in an open cloud platform. Our technology collaboration makes it easier to run applications in the cloud while providing transparency and control with multi-cloud portability.”
—Michael Crandell, chief executive officer, RightScale

Another part of Cloud Foundary is Micro Cloud.  Micro Cloud is a single developer instance of Cloud Foundry that will be available in a few weeks.  Think of it as a personal PaaS that runs on your desktop by way of a VMWare Player image (as well as through hosted images on selected cloud partners).

Want to see the code?  The open source stack is available here.