Is Cloud Foundry on its way to become the de facto PaaS standard of the Industry?

Thursday August 02, 2012 , 4 min Read

I have been following Cloud Foundry from the day it got announced. It was very clear that VMware invested in it with a clear strategy – democratize PaaS by making it is absolutely easy for the hosters and enterprises to deploy it. Between 2008 and 2011, PaaS was associated with Google (App Engine), Microsoft (Windows Azure), Salesfore.com (Force.com / Heroku) and Engine Yard. But in the last one year, there are half-a-dozen new players that entered the niche PaaS market. And, one thing that is common among these new entrants is that all of them are powered by Cloud Foundry. Whether it is ActiveState, AppFog, Tier 3, Uhuru Software, PaaS.io or VMware’s own CloudFoundry.com, all of them use the same set of APIs and tools based on Cloud Foundry.

Architecting PaaS is not a trivial task! Microsoft and Google put some of the best brains behind Windows Azure and App Engine. An average hoster or even a mature Cloud service provider cannot match the reliable PaaS architecture that Windows Azure or App Engine offer. But by adopting Cloud Foundry, any hoster can claim to be a PaaS player. They can offer popular languages, runtimes, frameworks and services without dealing with the complexity of packaging them for the Cloud. This will commoditize PaaS by empowering many service providers to turn into a PaaS provider overnight!

The other important factor is the emerging Private PaaS paradigm within the enterprises. As public facing line-of-business and web applications find their way to the Public Cloud, enterprises are looking at a Private PaaS layer that they can target to deploy internal applications. If enterprises can find the same PaaS that powers their Private Cloud and the Public Cloud, they can standardize their deployment environments across the organization. This gives them a huge productivity boost along with cost efficiency. By adopting Cloud Foundry as the deployment environment to run the internal LOB applications, enterprises can get the same abilities of the Public PaaS within their environment. Because Cloud Foundry can be run on any Public IaaS Cloud, it is possible to move Cloud applications across the Private and Public Clouds seamlessly. Given the fact that VMware has a lead in the enterprise market through their vSphere adoption, it is a matter of time before they tightly integrate vFabric with Cloud Foundry to offer a solid Private PaaS to their customers.

In the last few weeks, three major announcements reinforced this idea of Cloud Foundry becoming an industry standard for PaaS. AppFog has gone into the GA mode and they give the developers a choice to deploy their apps on multiple Clouds including AWS, Windows Azure, Rackspace and HP Cloud. Uhuru has announced a revamped beta in the form of Uhuru AppCloud. Finally, ActiveState Stackato has entered 2.0 and announced support for .NET.

AppFog has taken an interesting route to offer PaaS across multiple Clouds. By exposing the standard Cloud Foundry APIs that map into the underlying Public Cloud, it enables developers to use the standard APIs and tools to deal with their applications without the need to learn new APIs. The most interesting use of this scenario is seen in its integration with Windows Azure. Microsoft has revamped the Windows Azure platform and the supporting APIs. AppFog built a virtual Cloud Foundry API that translates the REST API into Windows Azure’s new REST API. They also sync the account credentials so that the developers need not even signup with Windows Azure separately. It is also possible to clone applications to Windows Azure that are deployed in AWS, Rackspace or HP Cloud. This is a very compelling scenario for developers. I deployed a WordPress website through AppFog and I really liked the simplicity. There are only 3 steps that I dealt with – 1) Choosing an Application, 2) Choosing the target Cloud and, 3) Choosing the unique subdomain name.

Last week Uhuru has launched their new beta of the AppCloud platform based on Cloud Foundry. I tried deploying an app through their new portal and found it to be simple. Uhuru is one of the few PaaS providers to bring .NET capabilities to the Cloud Foundry environment.

Finally, ActiveState Stackato entered 2.0 with a set of new features including the support for .NET. ActiveState and Tier 3 collaborated to add the .NET support to Stackato.

With VMware investing in Cloud Foundry and the ecosystem extending it, Cloud Foundry is turning out to be a viable PaaS for the businesses.

- Janakiram MSV, Chief Editor, CloudStory.in

Advertise with us