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VMware's Pivotal acquisition shows Cloud Foundry's strength

Not so long ago there were fears that Cloud Foundry and other Platform-as-a-Service programs were on their way out. VMware's purchase of Pivotal shows there's a dance in the old PaaS yet.
Written by Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Senior Contributing Editor

Pivotal was in trouble. Its first quarterly report for its 2020 fiscal year was bad. Its stock got stomped on and dropped by almost half. Then, VMware, which spun Pivotal out in the first place, rode in as a white knight to acquire the troubled company

Why? Because I believe, based on talks with insiders and analysts, it sees value in Pivotal's outstanding Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud, Cloud Foundry. Certainly, the market loves this proposed deal. Pivotal's stock surged up by almost 70% after the news first emerged.

Cloud Foundry itself has faced headwinds recently. It was thought it would be replaced by Kubernetes-based hybrid-cloud approaches. Since then, Cloud Foundry embraced Kubernetes and has regained momentum. 

Abby Kearns, executive director of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, reports that in the soon-to-be-released Cloud Foundry end-user survey, "In just two years, broad deployment of Cloud Foundry has nearly doubled. With 45% of our users describing their Cloud Foundry use as 'broad' (compared to 30% in 2018 and 23% in 2017)."

Cloud Foundry enables Java, Ruby, Node.js, .NET Core, Python, PHP, and Go developers to build cloud-native applications from their existing data-center based programs. This approach, combined with Kubernetes, has found favor with both hybrid and the increasingly hot multi-cloud approach. 

In multi-cloud, you have more than one public or private cloud from different providers. So, in a multi-cloud, you can have two or more public or private clouds. For example, you can use Cloud Foundry's Open Service Broker API (OSBAPI) to connect with Azure services from within Cloud Foundry running on say a private OpenStack cloud. 

The technology is strong. The question remains, when this new marriage happens, whether the new VMware/Cloud Foundry will be able to deliver the business deals its stockholders are hoping for. 

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