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VMware CTO describes Cloud Foundry as 'Linux of the Cloud'

After one year of availability, VMware reflects about its open platform-as-a-service solution, Cloud Foundry.
Written by Rachel King, Contributor

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- VMware's open platform-as-a-service, Cloud Foundry, is celebrating its one year anniversary, offering both VMware and participating developers a chance to evaluate how the solution is working and what needs to be modified going forward.

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VMware chief technology officer Steve Herrod admitted that they weren't sure how Cloud Foundry would pan out and how many developers would sign on.

Nevertheless, after one year of availability, Herrod said that there are more non-VMware contributors to the system than VMware participants.

"It lets developers focus on coding," said Herrod, positing that Cloud Foundry frees developers from spending too much time on worrying about things that don't matter.

Some of Cloud Foundry's stats-to-date:

  • More than 75,000 downloads
  • 3,300 forks and followers
  • Dozens of major frameworks available

Herrod pointed toward expanding investment in Cloud Foundry from other industry partners and around the ecosystem needed for cloud-based applications, including Box and 10gen. One of VMware's newest partners is eBay's X.commerce platform, which Herrod explained is being used to offer developers a "consistent way" to build apps using many runtime services without worrying about specifics.

One of the core points to understanding Cloud Foundry is that it is designed to offer developers more options when it comes to private cloud distribution, public cloud operators, and management and deployment overall.

Essentially, the goal is to make "multi-cloud" platforms a reality.

"It's about choice at every point of this system," Herrod said, even referring to Cloud Foundry as the "Linux of the Cloud."

Keeping this "multi-cloud imperative" in mind, Herrod remarked that cloud platforms should be agnostic, running consistently across public, private or micro clouds.

"Locking yourself in operationally or technically is really not going to be the right path going forward," Herrod said, asserting that "it's a losing proposition."

Going forward, there is a new submission process available on CloudFoundry.org, which is touted to provide a more efficient connection with the developer community and engage with them more like peers and as an extension of VMware's engineering team.

Other revamps to the system include more new codes and components added to the app lifecycle management, which are intended really to be working behind-the-scenes while offering developers a more seamless experience.

One big release from VMware this week is Cloud Foundry BOSH, an open source tool-chain for release engineering, deployment and lifecycle management of large-scale distributed services.

Described as a way of creating releases while managing systems and services, BOSH was built to deploy and manage production-class, large-scale clusters as well as DevOps usage and scale by veteran developers concerned with continuous and iterative development.

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