VMware is aiming to further broaden the open-source cloud deployment by collaborating with multiple software and hardware providers to promote the broader integration of Cloud Foundry, the open platform-as-a-service project it initiated.
Cloud Foundry is designed to support multiple frameworks, multiple cloud providers and multiple application services on a scalable, cloud-based platform. VMware recently announced new collaborations with Canonical, Dell, enStratus and Opscode designed to further the deployment of the platform.
On the Cloud Foundry blog, the team behind the platform describes their aim and why the collaborations are important:
When we launched Cloud Foundry, we wanted to change the rules of PaaS portability in the cloud. Until then using a PaaS meant being bound tightly to a single provider, often running only a single instance, tied directly the availability and performance of a single cloud. One of the core tenants of the Cloud Foundry Open PaaS project is ‘multi-cloud,’ the ability to run the system on the cloud or infrastructure of your choice without affecting the developer experience or VMC client interface. Today we are announcing collaborations with key industry partners, dramatically expanding the integrated tooling for running Cloud Foundry almost anywhere, and delivering on our portability vision.
Canonical, for example, is making the VMC client and VCAP server available as packages for the 11.10 release of its Ubuntu operating system—the OS that forms the core of CloudFoundry.com. The idea is to easy Cloud Foundry app deployment for enterprises that rely on Ubuntu.
Dell, meanwhile, is configuring open source cloud software onto bare metal hardware systems with a software framework called Crowbar. Cloud Foundry is releasing a Crowbar barclamp that will install and configure Cloud Foundry so that Crowbar can be used for configuration, network discovery, status monitoring, performance data gathering and alerting.
Cloud management developer enStratus is adding Cloud Foundry to its service catalog, enabling Cloud Foundry to be deployed and managed on any of the 18 different clouds its support, as well as any vSphere or vCloud director environments. And finally, Opscode—the creator of Chef, an open-source systems integration framework built for automating the cloud—is integrating Cloud Foundry into its Opscode Hosted Chef (OHC) environment to allow users to configure and deploy Cloud Foundry to most environments with a single command.
