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VMware: Cloud Foundry PaaS will be the 'Linux' of the cloud

In an ongoing effort to make its Cloud Foundry the Linux of the cloud, the company announced today two open source projects -- Bosh and re-engineered CloudFoundry.org management platform -- and emphasized that its PaaS is open source and offers multi-cloud support for the new generation of cloud apps.
Written by Paula Rooney, Contributor

VMware launched today a new open source project called BOSH and re-engineered open source CloudFoundry.org management process designed for developers using its one-year-old open source Cloud Foundry Platform-As-A-Service platform.

See also: Cloud Foundry is celebrating  one-year anniversary | VMware CFO jumps to Workday

And it's open,  VMware execs said, emphasizing the multi-cloud deployment options offered by the VMware PaaS. In other words, no lock-in. It has gained the support of many top frameworks including .Net, Python and PHP and a growing ecosystem that now includes Cloud9, Collabnet, ServiceMesh, Soasta and X.commerce.

Got it? If there's one thing that VMware execs emphasized during a company webcast today, it was open source.  In his remarks, VMware CTO Steve Herrod said not once but twice that VMware wants to be the "Linux of the cloud" and that the company realizes that developers require an open source platform to develop the new generation of applications.

Multicloud "is the imperative for this space. We knew [Cloud Foundry]has to be agnostic on which cloud it runs..private clouds, public clouds, micro clouds," Herrod said during a webcast celebrating the PaaS first year anniversary today, notng that application portability across platforms and clouds is key to Cloud Foundry's continued success. "Multicloud is a necessity."

As part of the one year anniversary of Cloud Foundry, VMware announced the Bosh open source toolchain as well as a newly structured CloudFoundry.org open source system for code submissions.

The BOSH toolchain for developers is designed for "release engineering, depolyment and lifecycle management for large scale distributed services," VMware engineering guru Marc Lucovsky announced today during a webcast highlighting the progress of the overall Cloud Foundry open source project.

It's not a product, but a project, VMware executives said, noting that it, like Cloud Foundry itself, is open source.

"It's a real system ... built to deploy production scale large scale clusters .. and its very useful for smaller scale multinode clusters," Lucovsky said, noting that VMware used it to enhance and redevelop the Cloud Foundry platform incrementally over the past year. "Bosh is for DevOps usage and built by a team of crack engineers with lots of mileage in this space. It's not a product but an open source project with a command line interface and [users]are expected to udnerstand what YAML is. "

The re-engineered CloudFoundry.org is described by the company as an open source management system that facilitates broader participation in the developer community by simplifying code contributions, improving code quality and offering greater visibility into code changes as they happen,"

The new .org platform is built upon the same stack as OpenStack and Google and open source -- the way it needs to be to get developer buy-in, executives noted. When it was launched a year ago, it was known as Cloud Foundry.com.

In the past year, Cloud Foundry has enjoyed 75,000 downloads and earned great excitement from all types of developers. The majority of contributions today come from non VMware employees, Herrod noted.

"The type of application development environent for clouds will be PaaS. It lets developers focus on writing code instead of hunting for hardware and monkeying around with middleware," he said.

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