PaaS Is The Future Of Cloud Services: CloudFoundry Lines Up Deployment Partners

This is next in the series of post where I am highlighting the importance of PaaS in the future of cloud services. VMware’s CloudFoundry (previous CloudAve coverage) has completely altered the PaaS landscape with a first multi-cloud, multi-language open source platform. While the platform has clearly won the hearts of both pundits and developers, there were some confusions regarding how far they will go in pushing their open source code. Well, we have an answer for that question today. VMware today announced deployment partners for CloudFoundry, staying true to their multi-cloud mantra.

The partners announced by VMware are

Ubuntu: CloudFoundry Client (VMC) will be part of the main repository of Ubuntu operating system and packages made available for servers that can be deployed on multiple nodes. These packages are created by Canonical, underlying a deep partnership between them.
Dell: Dell Crowbar (previous CloudAve coverage) will support deployment of CloudFoundry onto Dell systems (essentially letting CloudFoundry run on top of OpenStack).
enStratus: enStratus will include CloudFoundry in its Service Catalog so that users can deploy and manage CloudFoundry across 18 different clouds including vSphere and vCloud.
Opscode: Similarly, anyone using Opscode‘s hosted Chef platform can deploy CloudFoundry using their cookbooks.
Rightscale: It is also available from Rightscale as a server template from their services catalog.

While these partnerships help CloudFoundry reach more users through these partners, this will also help them against OpenShift. One of the advantages OpenShift has over CloudFoundry is the availability of Redhat Linux underneath their platform. Not only VMware lacks an operating system (well, who cares about OS in a PaaS world), there was also the risk of CloudFoundry’s “open mantra” getting diluted by the presence of VMware proprietary brand. To be frank, I myself have heard this comment from someone at OSCON while we were discussing the relative merits of both OpenShift and CloudFoundry platforms. The partnership with Ubuntu will blunt any such criticism and shore up CloudFoundry’s open source credentials even further.

The PaaS space is really heating up with many different players pushing their multi-language, multi-cloud strategies. These partnerships will give VMware a chance to get further traction on their CloudFoundry platform. It will be interesting to see the adoption of this platform in the coming year. Keep a tab on them if you are keen on following the PaaS landscape.