VMware Launches Open Source Cloud Foundry

VMware is accelerating its cloud efforts today with the announcement of its new Cloud Foundry project. Cloud Foundry is an open source application platform for the cloud.

"Cloud Foundry is about expanding a PaaS engine across multiple clouds, frameworks and application services," Jerry Chen and his title is Senior Director of Cloud and Application Services at VMware told InternetNews.com.

Chen noted that with Cloud Foundry, VMware (NYSE: VMW) is aiming to lower the barriers to adoption for the cloud.

Cloud Foundry will work with VMware’s vFabric, cloud application effort. VMware announced vFabric in August 2010 as a set of application services for the cloud.

"Cloud Foundry consumes and makes vFabric easier to deploy to your applications," Chen said.

Chen noted that Cloud Foundry is an open source project that will be operated by VMware under an Apache open source license. It has chosen to be an open source project is to encourage participation and innovation.

VMware indicated its intention to build a commercial product on top of Cloud Foundry. Chen added that VMware has not yet disclosed when the commercial product will debut. The open source version is currently available as a beta at CloudFoundry.org

Cloud Foundry is not intended to be a rival to other open source cloud efforts like OpenStack for example. Chen noted that efforts like OpenStack and Eucalyptus are essentially infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).

"Cloud Foundry rides one layer above the IaaS, so we can abstract away the PaaS engine from the underlying infrastructure program," Chen said. "So you take Cloud Foundry and you can run it with OpenStack."