VMware’s Cloud Foundry Ushers In The Era Of Open PaaS

Mention VMware to anyone in IT and their immediate thought is virtualization. So dominant is the company in this space that the very word VM has a sense of ambiguity about it: does it refer specifically to a vmdk, or another hypervisor image like Xen? As with Kool-Aid and Band-Aid, there is nothing better for a company than to contribute a word to the English lexicon, and while VMware may not completely own virtual machine, they command enough association to get passed the doorman of that enviable club.

Strong associations however, may not translate directly into revenue. From open source Xen to Microsoft’s Hyper-V, virtualization technology is rapidly commoditizing, a threat not lost on VMware. Hypervisors are now largely free, and much of the company’s continued success derives from the sophisticated management products that make mass virtualization a tractable challenge in the enterprise. But for every OpenView, there is ultimately a Nagios to content with, so the successful company is always innovating. VMware, a very successful company, is innovating by continuing its push up the stack.

Last week VMware introduced Cloud Foundry, an open Platform-as-a-Service product that represents an important step to transform the company into a dominant PaaS player. You don’t have to read any tea leaves to see this has been their focused strategy for some time; you just have to look at their acquisitions. SpringSource for Java frameworks; RabbitMQ for queuing; Gemstone for scalable, distributed persistence; and Hyperic to manage it all—it’s basically the modern developer’s shopping list of necessary application infrastructure. The only thing they are still missing is security.

Cloud Foundry assembles some components of this technology in a package that enables developers to skip the once-necessary evil of infrastructure integration and to instead concentrate fully on the business problems they’ve been tasked to solve. It is a carefully curated stack of cloud-centric frameworks and infrastructure made available by a cloud provider as a service. Right now, you can use Cloud Foundry in VMware-managed cloud; but the basic offering is available for any cloud, public or private. Applications should be easily portable between any instance of Cloud Foundry. VMware even promises a forthcoming micro-cloud VM, which makes any developer’s laptop into a cloud development environment.

All of this reduces friction in application development. Computing is full of barriers, and we often fall into the psychological trap of perceiving these to be bigger than they actually are. Barriers are the enemy of agile, and basic infrastructure is a barrier that too often saps the energy out of a new idea before it has a chance to grow. Make the plumbing available, make it simple to use, and half the battle for new apps is over. What’s left is just fun.

Cloud Foundry is important because it’s like a more open Azure. Microsoft deserves credit for keeping the PaaS dream alive with their own offering, but Azure suffers from a sense of lock-in, and it really only speaks to the Microsoft community. Plus the Microsoft ad campaign for cloud is so nauseating it might as well be bottled as a developer repellant for people who hate geeks.

Cloud Foundry, in contrast, goes far to establish its claim to openness. It references the recently announced Cloud Developer’s Bill of Rights, another initiative spearheaded by VMware. Despite being a Java-head myself, I was encouraged to learn that Cloud Foundry offered not just Spring, but Ruby on Rails, Sinatra for Ruby and Node.js. They also support Grails, as well as other frameworks based on the JVM. Persistence is handled by MySQL, MongoDB, or the Redis database, which is a decent range of options. So while VMware has’t quite opened up all their acquisition portfolio to the cloud community, they have assembled the critical pieces and seem genuine in their goal of erasing the stigma of lock-in that has tarnished previous commercial PaaS offerings.

I’m a fan of PaaS; I’m even a member of the club that believes that of the big three *-as-a-Services, PaaS is destined to be the dominant pattern. Managing and configuring infrastructure is, in my mind, pretty much on par with actually managing systems—a task I consider even less rewarding than shoveling manure. And I’m not alone in this opinion either. Once PaaS becomes open and trustworthy, it will be an automatic choice for most development. PaaS is the future of cloud, and VMware knows this.