VMware Wednesday unveiled Micro Cloud Foundry, the latest iteration of the application development platform-as-a-service it rolled out in April.
Micro Cloud Foundry is a downloadable version of Cloud Foundry that's installed on a desktop or notebook PC and is designed to run inside a single virtual machine. It includes all the software components necessary to maintain symmetry between the local environment and the full version of Cloud Foundry, according to David McJannet, director of product marketing for application platform at VMware.
"Using Micro Cloud Foundry, developers can build applications on a local Cloud Foundry instance, using programming frameworks like Spring and Ruby, without having to install database or middleware," McJannet said.
Micro Cloud Foundry is also a reflection of mobile workers' desire to be productive wherever they're at, and McJannet said VMware has received "many interesting requests" from users that have underscored the need for a PaaS offering they can access on the go.
"If I'm a developer and want to build applications while I'm at Starbucks, Micro Cloud Foundry allows me to develop it locally and be able to test and run it," he said. "Then when it's ready, I can connect to the network and push the application up to the Cloud Foundry service."
Cloud Foundry is a significant product for VMware because it provides a way for developers to rewrite apps in Java so that they'll run well on private clouds -- thus paving the way for the industry's move into the cloud, where VMware is already well ensconced.
VMware CEO Paul Maritz said in June that Cloud Foundry is also intended to be easier to work with than existing PaaS offerings.
"There has been a developer-led revolt against complexity, and developers have been moving to new frameworks," Maritz said in June at the Structure 2011 conference in San Francisco. "Developers no longer want to deal with wiring middleware infrastructure together, and they don't want to think about how to make apps scale."
In addition to Micro Cloud Foundry, VMware is also running a beta of the Cloud Foundry PaaS offering at www.CloudFoundry.com, and it's also overseeing www.CloudFoundry.org, an open-source project under the Apache 2 license.
