VMware disrupting the Cloud market with Cloud Foundry
I’ve been waiting for a while now for VMware to bring a PaaS offering to market, but I was pleasantly surprised with the newly announced Cloud Foundry. In their own words, Cloud Foundry is “a VMware-led project [that] is the world’s first open Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. Cloud Foundry provides a platform for building, deploying, and running cloud apps using Spring for Java developers, Rails and Sinatra for Ruby developers, Node.js and other JVM frameworks including Grails.”
There are several awesome things about this new offering. The first is that it’s open source. This is huge in many ways, but the most important thing to businesses looking at Cloud Foundry is that being open source does a lot to eliminate vendor lock-in. Secondly, the offering spans public, private and hybrid cloud computing. This is an offering that hits many key areas across the cloud spectrum. Lastly, there will be a ‘micro cloud’ version coming out that allows developers to test on their own desktops and laptops. This is HUGE because you are not forced to deploy a full blown private cloud (or push to a public cloud) for development and testing. Let’s take a little time to discuss the three pieces of Cloud Foundry.
First is CloudFoundry.com, VMware’s hosted commercial public cloud offering. From their own website: “The VMware hosted, managed and supported service, CloudFoundry.com provides a multitenant PaaS from VMware that runs on the industry leading vSphere cloud platform. Initially, CloudFoundry.com supports Spring for Java apps, Rails and Sinatra for Ruby apps, Node.js apps and apps for other JVM frameworks including Grails. Cloud Foundry also offers MySQL, Redis, and MongoDB data services.” This is where most enterprises will deploy their apps when they want to go to the public cloud. It will be backed by VMware and offer support and services that wrap the offering. This is similar to Amazon’s AWS PaaS offering – Elastic Beanstalk, Google’s App Engine, Microsoft’s Azure and Salesforce’s Force.com.
Second is the open source project CloudFoundry.org. From their own website: “The open-source community site, CloudFoundry.org, is the community where developers can collaborate and contribute to the Cloud Foundry project. For a full catalog of software services available in the open source stack, please refer to the community website at CloudFoundry.org.” This is the truly innovative piece of the Cloud Foundry line-up that no other big cloud vendor is offering. There is great potential synergy with other open source projects like OpenStack (which is backed by NASA and Rackspace among others) and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC). This is where I expect to see a lot of interest and innovation in the short and long term.
Lastly, (and the best part in my opinion) is the Cloud Foundry Micro Cloud. From their own website: “Micro Cloud is a single developer instance of Cloud Foundry. It provides developers with a personal PaaS that runs on their desktop. Micro Cloud is provided as a downloadable software image for VMware Fusion or VMware Player, as well a hosted image on selected cloud partners.” This is big in so many ways. Prior to the Micro Cloud concept, developers had to deploy a small private cloud (or spin up a paid instance from a public cloud provider like Amazon) in order to test their code. The Micro Cloud will now allow developers to deploy a developer instance on their own workstations (and/or laptops) for development and testing. Think of this as a cloud IDE. The Micro Cloud will save time and money in the development process.
There is much more information available on the Cloud Foundry FAQ at http://cloudfoundry.com/faq. As always, the VMware Guy is happy to come out to your location for professional services engagements centered around VMware and Cloud Computing. I am proud to announce that Cloud Foundry training and consulting services are now offered by the VMware Guy. Call now to schedule your services engagement.
Making desktop Linux work for business | InfoWorld | Analysis | 2008-07-01 | By Neil McAllister
Today's IT managers face tough choices. PCs that run fine today have an uncertain upgrade path, now that Microsoft has chosen to discontinue Windows XP. Upgrade costs associated with Vista, coupled with the ever-escalating cost of application licenses, make switching to desktop Linux an increasingly attractive option.
For many businesses, however, it's difficult to know where to begin. The Linux market is broad and thriving, with myriad options to choose from. Most organizations will want to phase in Linux gradually, which in many cases will mean supporting a heterogeneous computing environment for the first time. As a result, it can be hard to predict where software incompatibilities might affect critical business processes.
Fortunately, the future of Linux on the business desktop has never been brighter. Bolstered by contributions from some of the biggest names in IT, today's Linux offers a rich, highly functional user experience to compete with any proprietary OS. With appropriate planning, integrating a limited number of Linux desktops into your existing environment can be undertaken with minimal difficulty, paving the way for a broader migration tomorrow.
Making desktop Linux work for business | InfoWorld | Analysis | 2008-07-01 | By Neil McAllister
Sun finishing up the complete open-sourcing of the Java Platform
It seems that Sun Microsystems is now moving swiftly toward open-sourcing all of the Java platform. At present, all but some 4% of the platform has been opened up and released without constraints. The remaining pieces, which include some sound, graphics and SNMP functionality, will soon be opened up as well.
The reasoning behind this push for completely open-sourcing the Java platform is that it will now be able to be packaged and shipped with Linux distributions, which often only package truly and fully open-source software. This will help push Java usage and development to more places than ever before, and will really hit home with the type of crowd you want using your development platform - open-source developers.
Sun is working closely with Linux distributors like OpenSuse, Ubuntu and Fedora to make all of this a possibility. "We're hoping to see some movement [with the] Linux distributions in the very near future, hopefully by JavaOne," said Rich Sands, group manager for developer marketing at Sun, in an interview on Tuesday. As a side note, JavaOne will take place in San Francisco in two weeks.
Although I am not a developer in the strict sense, I do regularly script things in Python and write small apps here and there. Python is a very powerful language, and I love it to death, but bringing Java to the masses through a truly open implementation of the platform is a huge step toward forming a development core around a truly multi-platform development platform (no pun intended.)
There was once a time when resources in a computer were limited and efficiency in coding was of paramount importance. Today, however, resources are plentiful and hardware is cheap. It makes more sense now to work with a slightly less efficient development platform that can run on any operating system and throw more hardware where needed to increase speed.
This step by Sun can possibly lead to a scenario where most new applications are written once in Java and able to run on just about any hardware. This drastically reduces development time (and cost) for multi-platform applications while at the same time increasing the possible user base of an application. It's truly a win-win situation for Sun and application developers everywhere.
Perhaps in another post I will delve into how the implementation of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) as a virtual appliance that runs in virtualization software like VMware or VirtualBox can result in the eventual removal of an operating system all together? What do you think?
My Twitter Stream
- I've been using #Ubuntu 12.04 since Thursday for all of my work instead of my #Mac. I have to admit, it is solid, stable and awesome! 2 weeks ago
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