Micro Cloud Foundry provides offline cloud capabilities

With the Micro Cloud Foundry beta, VMware has released an offline variant of its Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution. The system is claimed to simplify the development of cloud applications using Spring-based Java, Ruby on Rails, and a range of other languages and services; the process is said to be as straightforward as creating normal web applications. With Micro Cloud Foundry, a suitable cloud environment can be implemented locally in such a way that developers can create their applications offline.

Technically speaking, the system offers the classical Cloud Foundry as a virtual machine (based on a 64-bit Ubuntu system). This allows developers to minimise their configuration efforts, which is ultimately designed to reduce the development time of apps for cloud environments. The system is also claimed to conveniently allow developers to test their applications offline before they transfer them to the cloud. This is said to be possible because the virtual machine is fully compatible with Cloud Foundry.

The system currently supports Spring for Java, Ruby on Rails and Sinatra, Node.js, Grails and other JVM-based frameworks, including Scala Lift and the MongoDB, MySQL and Redis application services. VMware says that further vFabric services are planned to become available in future versions.

Running Micro Cloud Foundry under Windows and Linux requires the VMware Player or VMware Workstation to be installed, while VMware Fusion is the recommended requirement under Mac OS X. Developers must also register for Cloud Foundry if they want to download Micro Cloud Foundry.

The Cloud Foundry open source project and community are hosted on CloudFoundry.org. The Apache 2.0 Licensed source code is available on GitHub.

See also:

• Ubuntu 11.10 to support the Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a-Service, a report from The H.
• Cloud Foundry to support Scala, a report from The H.
• VMware announces Cloud Foundry, a report from The H.

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