Ubuntu 11.10 to support the Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a-Service

Canonical has announced that October's Ubuntu 11.10, Oneric Ocelot, will now include VMware's Cloud Foundry, the open source Platform-as-a-Service cloud environment. Cloud Foundry was launched in April and already supports Spring, Grails, Rails, Sinatra, Node.js and Scala applications.

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) clouds offer environments for running applications adapted for the cloud, as opposed to Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds, such as OpenStack and Amazon EC2, which offer a cloud of virtual machines on which to run operating systems and their applications. PaaS clouds offer APIs to resources such as databases which in turn allows the underlying cloud code to optimise and scale access to those resources.

Ubuntu 11.10 will offer packages for Cloud Foundry's VMC Client, which allows for application deployment and management, and VCAP Server, which allows systems to be configured as a node in a PaaS cloud. VMC Client can be used to configure and deploy applications to any Cloud Foundry cloud, including VMware's own CloudFoundry.com, a currently free, invitation-by-request, public cloud. The server packages can also be configured to run on nodes of an IaaS cloud such as OpenStack.

The packages will be available from the 11.10 Universe repository. Core developer on Ubuntu Server, Dustin Kirkland, has already published an introduction to VMC Client and VCAP Server. The final release of 11.10 should see client and server deployment tools, built for Ubuntu ensemble which previewed in 11.04, to simplify the process further.

(djwm)