For Cloud Foundry, splitting out of VMware seems to have unleashed a cascade of momentum. This summer alone, we’ve seen GE endorse Cloud Foundry and our Hadoop based tech to the tune of $105 million. Then we opened up a customer advisory council to better partner with other tech and cloud leaders. Right away, IBM jumped on board. They’re making it their standard PaaS platform and pushing their dev tools and middleware to be available on it. Their name, their brand and their huge swath of solutions that are just staples of software development almost instantly raised credibility that this project is the one everyone should be looking at.
A week later, Savvis did exactly the same thing. Possibly not as widely recognized as a household brand as IBM, let me assure you that Savvis’ endorsement is the same caliber endorsement as IBM. Savvis is a CenturyLink company, which is the third largest telecommunications vendor in the US. Their managed hosting services are top notch. In fact, 30 of the top 100 Fortune 500 companies use Savvis. Since Cloud Foundry is all about the development lifecycle process in the cloud, its absolutely perfect that a developer icon and a cloud service leader both are investing to move this project forward.
Next, Piston joined the party and aligned OpenStack with Cloud Foundry to put this whole momentum into high gear. OpenStack is the hugely popular open source Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) project. So now the leader for the open source IaaS project has picked its friend to run with in this race with the also open source Cloud Foundry PaaS. So just to keep count, now we have IBM, the tools and middleware software behemoth, Savvis, the big hitting cloud services provider, and Piston, the company that is powering the open source community around cloud infrastructure as a service, all standing shoulder to shoulder with us to bring the promise of PaaS to maturity as fast as possible.
This kind of momentum since the split has not gone unnoticed by the media either. In fact, Venture Beat just named Pivotal as one of the top 10 ‘arms merchants’ of the cloud. They also asked Paul Maritz, Pivotal’s CEO, to provide a keynote at their event that tracks the maturity of cloud services for the enterprise, CloudBeat 2013, in September. Maritz will cover the “operating system for the cloud”.
Cloud Foundry Shines at VMworld
With momentum moving at full canter, this week Pivotal proudly takes Cloud Foundry back to VMware’s big user event VMworld. Obviously having roots at VMware, for most of the attendees its not their first time seeing or hearing about Cloud Foundry. Somehow though, I think this week everyone is looking at it a little harder and hearing about it a little more clearly.
First, VMware reminded everyone at the event that they are backing Pivotal with an announcement of new products and services based exclusively on Cloud Foundry. In short, we’re partnering together to create Pivotal CF, a commercially supported hybrid Platform as a Service (PaaS) based on the Cloud Foundry platform. Pivotal CF will be made available on VMware vSphere® and vCloud® Hybrid Service™ later this year.
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Demonstrations of the product can be seen at the Pivotal booth at VMworld (Booth #1641), with select customers able to participate in an early access program.
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To drive the announcement home, VMware and Pivotal provided a keynote demo that previews the evolved Pivotal CF. The most exciting moment is when you watch 50VMs suddenly grow within the vCenter as BOSH does its thing and installs a full app deployment in Pivotal Cloud Foundry. And then it shows how easy it is to update it. The entire demo takes a whopping 4 minutes and 44 seconds. This demo is sure to make the little sys admin in everyone there reminisce how deploying 50 machines with a full app used to take days or weeks, and is now legitimately done in minutes.
Our SVP of Cloud Applications, Rob Mee summed up the impact of this in a quote on the official press release best:
“VMware’s continued commitment speaks volumes to the momentum that the Cloud Foundry platform has received over the past few months. As Cloud Foundry is fast becoming the preeminent open source, cloud-independent Platform as a Service, VMware’s support and new offerings will give customers a great set of choices to deploy their applications.”
This week at VMworld is set to be a powerful homecoming reminder that VMware is strongly in our court, and so are their customers.
To learn more about Cloud Foundry, visit CloudFoundry.com and read more at the Cloud Foundry blog.
To check out Pivotal at VMworld:
– Come visit us on the showfloor at booth #1641
– Check out our sessions:
- PHC4478 – Three Advantages of Running Cloud Foundry in a VMware Private Cloud, Wednesday, Aug 28, 8:00 AM – 9:00 AM in Moscone West, Room 2014
- OPT4490 – How to Replace Websphere Application Server (WAS) with tc Server, Thursday Aug 29, 10:30 AM – 11:30 AM at the Marriott, Yerba Buena Level, Salon 6.
- VAPP5762 – Big Data Platform Building Blocks: Serengeti, Resource Management, and Virtualization Extensions, Thursday, Aug 29, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM in Moscone West, Room 3003
- PHC7428 – OpenStack, AWS, and vCloud Hybrid Service: PaaS Bridges the Gaps through Cloud Foundry and AppFog, Thursday, Aug 29, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM in Moscone West, Room 3011
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