News

VMware Launches Cloud Foundry as First 'Open' PaaS

• By Michael Domingo
• April 12, 2011

VMware announced the launch of Cloud Foundry, which the company is touting as the as the first "open platform as a service" (PaaS), on Tuesday.

Cloud Foundry acts as a platform for building applications that can then be ported to various private and public clouds, whether on VMware's or any other company's cloud infrastructure. According to VMware, Cloud Foundry runs on top of vSphere and vCloud but, true to its "openness," can also run on top of other cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services and Google's AppEngine.

VMware announced Cloud Foundry at a virtual live event from the company's Palo Alto, Calif. headquarters.

Cloud Foundry allows developers from a multitude of disciplines, including Spring for Java, Ruby on Rails, Sinatra for Ruby and Node.js (to name a few), to deliver applications to just about any platform attached to the cloud. VMware is getting support initially from MongoDB, MySQL and Redis on the database management end.

Developers can access Cloud Foundry in beta form for free in two ways: at VMware-hosted public cloud PaaS at www.CloudFoundry.com, where developers can test out application builds and deployments in the cloud; and as an open source project via an Apache 2 license at www.CloudFoundry.org. VMware also plans to make available later this quarter a Micro Cloud version that allows developers to build and test apps locally, as well as a commercial-grade version for enterprises and service providers.

Cloud Foundry is the result of acquisitions and joint development efforts that the company announced nearly a year ago, said VMware CTO Steve Herrod in a blog post. It started with VMware's initial purchase of SpringSource (for its application development family) in August 2009, followed eight months later by its acquisition of RabbitMQ (application messaging) and, another month later, of GemStone Systems (data grid technology).

During the webcast announcing Cloud Foundry, VMware did not announce pricing and licensing information on final release versions, or hint at a timeline for future announcements. The webcast is available for replay here.