Cloud Foundry open platform as a service (PaaS)

Cloud Foundry, claimed to be the industry’s first open platform as a service (PaaS), is designed specifically for cloud computing environments and is delivered as a service from enterprise data centres and public cloud service providers.

Cloud Foundry streamlines the development, delivery and operations of modern applications, enhancing the ability of developers to deploy, run and scale their applications in cloud environments while incorporating the widest choice of public and private clouds, industry-standard high productivity developer frameworks and application infrastructure services.

The open PaaS provides a broad choice of development frameworks and languages, heterogeneous application services and cloud deployment environments. It also provides a high degree of portability, minimising lock-in by enabling developers to migrate applications between environments.

Cloud Foundry supports popular, high-productivity programming frameworks, including Spring for Java, Ruby on Rails, Sinatra for Ruby and Node.js, as well as support for other JVM-based frameworks including Grails. For application services, it will initially support the MongoDB, MySQL and Redis databases with planned support for VMware vFabric services.

Cloud Foundry is not tied to any single cloud environment, nor does it require a VMware infrastructure to operate, and it supports deployment to any public and private cloud environment.

Multiple delivery models are available, including VMware-operated Developer Service - a full-function public cloud PaaS service enabling developers to access Cloud Foundry and providing a test bed for new services and operational optimisation. Another model, Open Source, Community PaaS Project is an open source project and community under Apache 2 licence that enables developers to inspect, evaluate and modify Cloud Foundry software based on their own needs, while also minimising the risk of lock-in.

Cloud Foundry Micro Cloud is a downloadable Cloud Foundry contained within a virtual machine on a developer’s desktop, enabling simplified development and testing of applications. Developers are able to build and test applications on their own machines and ensure that applications running locally will also run in production, without modification on any Cloud Foundry-based private or public cloud. A commercial PaaS for enterprises and service providers will also be available.