Why Today’s Cloud Foundry Foundation Launch Matters
Today�s announcement of the Cloud Foundry Foundation is a significant milestone for the industry�s leading open platform as a service project. The Cloud Foundry Foundation is made up of more than 40 member companies and will be managed as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project, a leader in managing and operating open source projects.
Having spent a majority of my career in the enterprise Java space, I have burned countless hours twiddling bits and letting my propeller spin while trying out new technologies in the name of finding some new golden nugget of binary gold. Such was the case almost five years ago when I tried what was the first iteration of cloudfoundry.com, which was much different than what it is today. I was mesmerized at the ease of taking a simple little Servlet-based app and instantly having it provisioned on the cloud. Of course I just called it �the web� back then, but it was a glimpse of what the future would bring.
Fast forward to a couple years ago at VMworld 2012. I delivered a session entitled �Build Your First Mobile Application… in the Cloud… in 60 Minutes. � We built an entire database-backed web application in Grails, bolted on a REST service, and then built a mobile application consuming that REST service in just one hour. All from scratch. All live on cloudfoundry.com. The audience participated the entire time as we were continuously pushing code to the cloud while people refreshed their browsers and phones. The audience shared my enthusiasm in how easy it was to build and deploy applications with such little platform dependencies. It went on to be the highest rated and one of the highest attended application sessions at both VMworld San Francisco and Barcelona that year, validating the appetite for this type of platform.
So the Cloud Foundry concept and ecosystem has been a long time coming. And today�s launch of the Cloud Foundry Foundation is important, as it aligns some of the biggest industry giants behind a proven common open platform for the future of application development. Ajay Patel, VMware�s Vice President of Application Services on vCloud Air, stated it best when he said �After spending years incubating at VMware, we are delighted to see Cloud Foundry being adopted as an industry standard for open platform as a service. Cloud Foundry is a foundational part of VMware�s hybrid cloud strategy of allowing customers to build and run next generation applications anywhere they want. We look forward to the evolution of the platform, and to be part of the community driving that evolution.”
Customers have the choice of contributing to the open source project itself, or to rely on one of the many commercial offerings. For example, at VMware we are actively involved with Pivotal to ensure that our customers can implement a true enterprise hybrid PaaS between their private data center and the cloud using Pivotal CF; bringing unparalleled flexibility and scalability to enterprise application developers.
Cloud Foundry Foundation is now a formal entity, and with it comes tremendous excitement around the future of PaaS. I am personally very excited to see what the next five years brings as it continues to evolve. Look for another blog post on the matter in December, 2019.
About Cloud Foundry Foundation
The Cloud Foundry Foundation is independent non-profit organization formed to sustain the development, promotion and adoption of Cloud Foundry as the global industry standard for open Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Cloud Foundry makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications. Cloud Foundry is an Apache 2.0 licensed project available on Github:http://bit.ly/1sgheVN. To learn more visithttp://www.Cloud Foundry.org
Jay Marshall is a Principal Cloud Development Strategist for VMware�s vCloud Air specializing in next generation application architecture. He has spent almost twenty years working in enterprise application development, a large portion of that time in enterprise Java and most recently mobile web. His passion for technology has helped launch multiple startups, legacy modernization projects, and bleeding edge application development and delivery initiatives.
from VMware Blogs http://bit.ly/1sgheVQ