VMware Cloud Foundry Plays Disruptive Role

What does a cloud-based development environment have to do with VMware’s primary mission, which is advanced management of the data center through virtualized operations? What did Cloud Foundry have to do with getting VMware’s cloud enabling products inside the doors of more service suppliers? Not much, I thought.

When Cloud Foundry was first announced, I assumed it would become a platform hosting VMware’s own Spring Framework and related tools, and this platform would be geared to building applications that would automatically be packaged into ESX Server virtual machines and run in a VMware partner cloud. The development environment would be compatible with the production environment, smoothing the task of deployment.

VMware called a gathering of the press–it organized the event as a rough equal to its launch of vSphere 4 at its headquarters three years ago–in effect to say those assumptions were not correct. Platform as a service is a cloud service delivery model where the user may build software in a cloud-based environment with lots of assistance on secondary systems and other basic plumbing. This approach has the benefit of reducing or eliminating deployment issues; the development environment is a near match to the production environment.

Joyent and Heroku are also PaaS systems on Amazon, but Cloud Foundry has taken the PaaS idea a step further. It’s an example of not only multiple development languages in the cloud; it also supports deployment to multiple clouds.

CTO Steve Herrod said VMware was unsure whether many developers would express interest. It had set a goal of 5,000 in the first year; 10,000 signed up in the first three days. "That was a bit of a problem," he said. If enough developers adopt it, Cloud Foundry will become "the Linux of cloud computing," he said. After giving early developer sign up numbers, however, VMware officials declined to state how many current active users Cloud Foundry has, which was curious. They stuck to the 75,000 download figure, many of which were probably the micro version of Cloud Foundry for a PC or laptop.

Mark Lucovsky, VP of engineering for Cloud Foundry, said VMware and outside contributors have been improving the operational capabilities of Cloud Foundry so that code from a contributor can be turned over to an automated system for function and performance tests. The test results are rated automatically by the Jenkins system, resulting in a pass or fail mark. That tells project reviewers and committers whether it’s worth their time to look through the submitted code, yielding improved efficiency in the project.

"Eighty percent of our work has been below the waterline," said Lucovsky, displaying an above and below the water picture of a massive iceberg. That’s interesting because it means Cloud Foundry isn’t just duplicating what other frameworks do but is bringing automated procedural improvements to the development process itself. Lucovsky, by the way, is the developer whose departure from Microsoft for Google several years ago prompted CEO Steve Ballmer to throw a chair across the room. He joined VMware in 2009.

Other speakers included Jerry Chen, VP of product management, Vadim Spivak, senior staff engineer, Kenn Saar, senior staff engineer, and Pat Bozeman, senior director of engineering. They cited Cloud Foundry’s environment for multiple languages and multiple development frameworks. Spring serves Java developers, but Cloud Foundry also has two Microsoft .Net development frameworks, Ruby, Erland, JRuby, PHP, Python, Grails 2, and Chef deployment tools. In other words, it’s become an open and general purpose development environment, one of the keys to its acceptance by developers.

Also, Cloud Foundry itself is open source code under the Apache license, which allows independent software vendors to take the code and add proprietary enhancements to it to make a product. Herrod said 3,300 alterations and forks in the code have been produced, a sign of developer activity, ISV interest, and ability to produce their own products from the code base.

Still, I don’t quite agree with Herrod’s analogy between Cloud Foundry and Linux. Cloud Foundry is not a cloud operating system, nor is it a general purpose system for building clouds that stay vendor neutral.

The more apt analogy was one derived from sitting down to talk with an old acquaintance, Tod Nielsen, former CEO of Borland Software, now co-president of VMware with Paul Maritz. The way Cloud Foundry works is to give developers a helping hand with all the middleware, messaging and other secondary systems that make their business logic work in a larger environment. In addition, what’s developed in Cloud Foundry can run in Cloud Foundry. If a developer wishes to use it as a deployment environment, it can be found in the VMware partner clouds hosted by Bluelock, Terremark, Colt, Singtel, and SoftBank. It can also be found on Amazon through AppFog, a startup that hosts a beta Cloud Foundry service for development there.

As Nielsen talked, I had to stop and think. VMware hopes most of its customers stick with an ESX Server cloud, such as the set mentioned with Bluelock. But if a customer wishes, Cloud Foundry can serve as his development site and will handle deployment issues to another cloud, provided your target cloud supports the use of Cloud Foundry in its environment. For example, there’s no production environment on Amazon yet, but AppFog appears to be headed in that direction. Right now, it just supports Cloud Foundry for development and PHP in production.

Depending on how many other cloud suppliers pick up on the opportunity, Cloud Foundry gives VMware customers an out from the potential lock-in that VMware rivals are always warning about. The analogy that comes to mind is not Linux but Java and the Java Virtual Machine. If there was a JVM for the target hardware, then Java would run there without alteration. Likewise, if a public cloud’s APIs and other plumbing recognize Cloud Foundry, then applications built in Cloud Foundry will run there.

VMware has made a name for itself and built a respectable revenue stream as a server consolidation play. IT has adopted it with enthusiasm because it saves money in the budget and space in the data center. But this phase of VMware’s success made it the consolidator of legacy systems. Those are not new, advance cloud applications going onto consolidated servers but legacy ones, for the most part. This made VMware potentially the designer of legacy cloud systems, at best, as it started its cloud product line. In addition, critics warn that VMware ESX Server is proprietary and you’re getting locked in if you use it.

Cloud Foundry, on the other hand, is open source code, a pan-language and multi-cloud approach to developing applications. Yes, we’re proprietary at the hypervisor level, VMware now says, but with Cloud Foundry you can develop a cloud application once on our platform and run it anywhere. Cloud Foundry will handle the underlying details, including the virtual machine format conversion, for you if you choose a non-VMware cloud.

The anywhere part still needs a lot of work. Rackspace, for example, is a primary mover behind OpenStack and it’s not likely to invest lots of effort in Cloud Foundry-supporting APIs.

But to illustrate the disrupter roll VMware is starting to play on this front, Wednesday it announced BOSH, a tool chain designed to make VMware’s Cloud Foundry accept and deploy code better that is now available as open source for other clouds to adopt. BOSH is "a prescriptive way of crating releases and managing systems and services" to run on a cluster. "It’s not a collection of shell scripts, or a pile of Perl."

Rather it’s a defined, standard and automated way to deploy code created on Cloud Foundry into a cloud environment. In creating such a tool chain, "a work in progress," said Lucovsky, VMware is doing more than enhancing the virtualized data center or consolidating more legacy applications. It’s offering a tool for deploying the applications of the future that will be created on its development platform.

If enterprise developers see Cloud Foundry as an opportunity to take what they know about VMware and extend it out into the cloud, both as a development environment and place to run a new generation of applications, then VMware will have stolen a march on principal rival Microsoft and many other would-be competitors. It’s not clear yet that it will work out that way, but Cloud Foundry looks less like for-VMware-only platform and more like VMware’s ticket to the coming, hybrid, private/public cloud operations of the future.