VMware's Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a-Service project took a step toward cloud interoperability this week with the release of Cloud Foundry Core, a program that allows developers to move applications across different cloud platforms.
The Cloud Foundry platform is being developed as an open-source project as core.cloudfoundry.org, and as a commercial product, which will be released next year.
VMware said it wants the Cloud Foundry platform to be used by developers to build applications that can work across different clouds to allow choice and prevent vendor lock-in.
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"In the cloud computing world, preserving a choice of clouds is critical. The risks of being locked into a single cloud are substantial," Dekel Tankel, director of product marketing, cloud application platform, at VMware, wrote on the Cloud Foundry blog. "Business requirements will evolve over time, necessitating the ability to move between clouds, whether public to private, private to public or between public cloud providers.
"Cloud Foundry Core provides a baseline of common capabilities and an open mechanism to instantly validate application portability," Tankel added.
To help developers move applications across clouds, Cloud Foundry has developed a common set of open-source frameworks and technologies that applications can use in a PaaS platform, including programming languages Java, Ruby and Node.js.
In practice, Cloud Foundry aims to make it easier for cloud customers to deploy applications in the cloud, Jerry Chen, VMware's vice president of product management and product marketing, said in an interview with CRN.
"This program gives customers the ability to be compatible with a common set of APIs, languages and supporting technologies, so that when they make a program once inside Cloud Foundry, they can deploy it into another cloud," Chen said. "It's been called cloud virtualization."
Chen said that while Amazon is well known as a top cloud provider, VMware is a leading cloud partner providing virtualization technology for public clouds and it is also one of the largest private cloud providers.
VMware, he said, is looking for partners to become involved with its PaaS services and to use them to add cloud services to their portfolios.
"As channel partners, solution providers, resellers and integrators look for ways to add value to customers, we see Cloud Foundry as part of the stack of essential cloud services for them, including vSphere [VMware's cloud operating system] and vCloud [its integrated suite of cloud infrastructure services]," Chen said.
PUBLISHED NOV. 16, 2012
