VMware celebrated the first anniversary of its Cloud Foundry
development platform Wednesday, and during the festivities on
Hillview Ave. in Palo Alto, which included a cake with a single
candle, all I could think of, was: "Why is VMware doing this?"
Why is it a big deal that Cloud Foundry is one year old? Cloud
Foundry has experienced 75,000 downloads since it became available
as open source code. So what? Those 75,000 downloads would
constitute a slow day for MySQL or the Apache Web Server
What does a cloud-based development environment have to do with
VMware's primary mission, which is advanced management of the data
center through virtualized operations? What did Cloud Foundry have
to do with getting VMware's cloud enabling products inside the
doors of more service suppliers? Not much, I thought.
When Cloud Foundry was first announced, I assumed it would become a
platform hosting VMware's own Spring Framework and related tools,
and this platform would be geared to building applications that
would automatically be packaged into ESX Server virtual machines
and run in a VMware partner cloud. The development environment
would be compatible with the production environment, smoothing the
task of deployment.
VMware called a gathering of the press--it organized the event as a
rough equal to its launch of vSphere 4 at its headquarters three
years ago--in effect to say those assumptions were not correct.
Platform as a service is a cloud service delivery model where the
user may build software in a cloud-based environment with lots of
assistance on secondary systems and other basic plumbing. This
approach has the benefit of reducing or eliminating deployment
issues; the development environment is a near match to the
production environment.
Heroku is another PaaS system running on Amazon, but Cloud Foundry
has taken the PaaS idea a step further. It's an example of not only
multiple development languages in the cloud; it also supports
deployment to multiple clouds.
CTO Steve Herrod said VMware was unsure whether many developers
would express interest. It had set a goal of 5,000 in the first
year; 10,000 signed up in the first three days. "That was a bit of
a problem," he said. If enough developers adopt it, Cloud Foundry
will become "the Linux of cloud computing," he said. After giving
early developer sign up numbers, however, VMware officials declined
to state how many current active users Cloud Foundry has, which was
curious. They stuck to the 75,000 download figure, many of which
were probably the micro version of Cloud Foundry for a PC or
laptop.
Mark Lucovsky, VP of engineering for Cloud Foundry, said VMware and
outside contributors have been improving the operational
capabilities of Cloud Foundry so that code from a contributor can
be turned over to an automated system for function and performance
tests. The test results are rated automatically by the Jenkins
system, resulting in a pass or fail mark. That tells project
reviewers and committers whether it's worth their time to look
through the submitted code, yielding improved efficiency in the
project.
"Eighty percent of our work has been below the waterline," said
Lucovsky, displaying an above and below the water picture of a
massive iceberg. That's interesting because it means Cloud Foundry
isn't just duplicating what other frameworks do but is bringing
automated procedural improvements to the development process
itself. Lucovsky, by the way, is the developer whose departure from
Microsoft for Google several years ago prompted CEO Steve Ballmer
to throw a chair across the room. He joined VMware in 2009.
Other speakers included Jerry Chen, VP of product management, Vadim
Spivak, senior staff engineer, Kenn Saar, senior staff engineer,
and Pat Bozeman, senior director of engineering. They cited Cloud
Foundry's environment for multiple languages and multiple
development frameworks. Spring serves Java developers, but Cloud
Foundry also has two Microsoft .Net development frameworks, Ruby,
Erland, JRuby, PHP, Python, Grails 2, and Chef deployment tools. In
other words, it's become an open and general purpose development
environment, one of the keys to its acceptance by developers.
Also, Cloud Foundry itself is open source code under the Apache
license, which allows independent software vendors to take the code
and add proprietary enhancements to it to make a product. Herrod
said 3,300 alterations and forks in the code have been produced, a
sign of developer activity, ISV interest, and ability to produce
their own products from the code base.
Still, I don't quite agree with Herrod's analogy between Cloud
Foundry and Linux. Cloud Foundry is not a cloud operating system,
nor is it a general purpose system for building clouds that stay
vendor neutral.