VMware, Piston partner on OpenStack layer for Cloud Foundry

It should come as no surprise that VMware has opted to play in the sandbox with OpenStack.

Parties at OpenStack enterprise cloud operating system developer Piston Cloud Computing said it has partnered with VMware to build an OpenStack layer to VMware's recently unveiled Bosh open source toolchain for Cloud Foundry, VMware's open source Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) platform.

VMware rival Citrix recently donated a rival open source cloud platform -- CloudStack -- to the Apache Software Foundation.

Christopher MacGown, Co-founder and CTO of Piston, said a VMware team attended the recent OpenStack conference and tried to enlist the help of developers to build a cloud provider interface between Bosh and OpenStack in order to grow VMware's open source Cloud Foundry.

VMware -- whose proprietary hypervisor and virtualization platform leads in the marketplace -- got a decidedly lukewarm response from the open source crowd. But VMware, which has opened sourced its Cloud Foundry PaaS, means business, he said.

"There's an imperative from VMware to say they support open APIs," McGown said. "

Piston is wriitng an OpenStack layer for the Bosh installation layer for Cloud Foundry. Piston owns the copyright and the Apache 2 licensed software code to the OpenStack layer, which will be in the base release of Cloud Foundry.

VMware's Bosh toolchain is designed as a PaaS for the Cloud Foundry Paas and enables release engineering, deployment and lifecycle management for large scale distributed services.