VMware announces Cloud Foundry

VMware has announced Cloud Foundry, a new hosted, managed and supported service which allows clients to run their Spring, Grails, Rails, Sinatra or Node.js applications on VMWare's vSphere cloud platform. Developers will be able to use a command line console or IDE support to take their applications and put them onto the cloud platform at CloudFoundry.com. The PaaS (Platform-as-a-service) will also offer MySQL, Redis and MongoDB data services.

The company also announced CloudFoundry.org, an open source community for developers to complement the open sourced code for the Cloud Foundry platform available on github. The code, released under an Apache 2.0 Licence, includes instructions on how to configure and test an Ubuntu 10.04 based cloud node for development. The project appears to have previously been named "vcap", according the the repositories; vcap contains the platform framework, vcap-services has foundry services which can be made available to applications, vcap-java contains the Java support, vcap-tests includes the unit tests and vmc is the repository for the command line client for deploying and controlling applications.

VMware previously had an offering called CloudFoundry, which allowed developers to deploy Spring applications onto the Amazon Web Services platform; this has been moved to classic.cloudfoundry.com. In a few weeks, the company also plans to make a "Micro Cloud" available as a downloadable image for developers to run a single developer instance more easily. Licensing terms of the "Micro Cloud" were not disclosed at this time.

(djwm)