The Cloud Foundry Community

May 3, 2011 Cloud Foundry

featured-cf-genericThe reaction to Cloud Foundry from the developer community since it was launched three weeks ago has been incredible. An open Platform-as-a-Service that offers a choice of development frameworks, application services and cloud infrastructure has proven to be very powerful.

One measure of this response is what people are doing with the source code. Lots of developers are digging into the code to understand how the system works and making their own modifications, with over a hundred forks of the code base. And we’re especially impressed with the contributions already being made to the project. The pull requests received so far to the Cloud Foundry github repos broadly break down into three groups:

  • Additional framework and runtime capabilities
  • Installation improvements and support for additional infrastructure
  • Fixed typos and similar small errors. We greatly appreciate these and these pull requests have already been accepted

Cloud Foundry initially supported the Spring, Rails, Sinatra and Node.js frameworks. In less than three weeks, developers have gotten Erlang, JRuby and PHP working with Cloud Foundry. Tony Arcieri (@Bascule) submitted a pull request adding JRuby support. Paul Jones submitted two pull requests adding support for both PHP and Erlang.

The goal for Cloud Foundry is to have support for as many frameworks and languages as possible, so we are delighted to see these requests. In the case of Erlang, we have just completed acceptance of this pull request. For the other runtimes we are working with their authors to complete remaining tasks, test, and integration issues.

We’ve also seen some great work to improve the installation process for Cloud Foundry. For example, Trotter Cashion (@cashion) sent a pull request for a fully automated installation script that has already been accepted. As a result of these improvements it is now extremely straightforward to install Cloud Foundry on a wide variety of infrastructures including Mac OSX and VirtualBox. Beyond the demonstrated support for vSphere and Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure, we have also learned of efforts under way to make Cloud Foundry run on other cloud infrastructures such as OpenStack. We look forward to Cloud Foundry running on any and every cloud, and offering developers portability across them.

We have accepted a number of pull requests at this point, and are working with the submitters to accept the remaining contributions into the Cloud Foundry open source repository. This means that if you clone the repos and build your own instance of Cloud Foundry, it will include support for these contributions. The next step is to decide which of these to put into production on CloudFoundry.com. There will always be a lag between the time a new framework is added to the open source code base and when it can be made available as a live service through api.cloudfloundry.com. Each new framework needs to be validated and tuned from an operational perspective, plus support staff and capacity need to be put into place.

We greatly appreciate your contributions toward improving Cloud Foundry, which make this truly a community project. VMware is deeply committed to an open approach to PaaS. We hope this approach to working with open source contributions will stimulate a great deal of innovation on the Cloud Foundry platform while ensuring that the CloudFoundry.com service provides the quality and ease of use that is our goal and your expectation. You can learn more about contributing to Cloud Foundry here.

Killian Murphy, Director of Product Management,

The Cloud Foundry Team

About the Author

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