The day after Microsoft announced its plans for supporting various open-source tools and technologies on its Windows Azure cloud platform, the rival VMware Cloud Foundry platform got a .Net infusion.
Cloud Foundry is a VMware’s platform-as-a-service; CloudFoundry.com is the VMware-hosted implementation of Cloud Foundry . To date, VMware has signed up and/or acquired a variety of partners — many of them with open-source offerings — to enable developers to write applications for its platform-as-a-service offering. Among the development platforms already supported on CloudFoundry.com are Spring for Java; Rails and Sinatra for Ruby; Node.js apps and apps for other JVM languages/frameworks including Groovy, Grails and Scala (according to the CloudFoundry FAQ).
An obvious omission from that list has been .Net. — at least until today, December 13.
Bellevue, Wash.-based Tier 3 Inc. is making availble an open-source.Net Framework implementation of the Cloud Foundry platform. The new offering, known as Iron Foundry, is available on GitHub under an Apache 2.0 license. It’s a fork of Cloud Foundry with ASP.Net support.
More details from Tier 3’s announcement:
“In addition to a core .NET Framework fork of Cloud Foundry, which Tier 3 is committing to keep it in sync with the main Cloud Foundry branch, developers can also access IronFoundry.org for both a Windows version of Cloud Foundry Explorer as well as a Visual Studio Plugin for Cloud Foundry.”
Tier 3 is focused on helping large and mid-size businesses move to the cloud. There are a few former Softies in the company’s ranks, including board member John Connors, a partner at Ignition and former Chief Financial Officer and Chief Information Officer at Microsoft. Speaking of former Softies, one-time Windows NT engineer Mark Lucovsky is now working on Cloud Foundry.
Update (December 15): A second VMware partner has announced support for .Net developers interested in Cloud Foundry. Uhuru Software, a startup headed by former Microsoft veteran Jawad Khaki, has an offering called .Net Services for Cloud Foundry, which officials are saying will allow developers to move existing .Net apps to the VMware cloud with no modifications.
