
Do you really want your IT department to define your application stack?
The term “Platform-as-a-Service” or PaaS is gaining widespread popularity. The PaaS promise is that either a hosted solution or a private cloud solution gives your enterprise all you need. You just write an application and post it to the Cloud. “Cloud Magic” will run and scale it for you. There is no lack of competition in […]

OSCON : Conversations, Deployments, Architecture, Docker and the Future?
I wrote about my first day of OSCON “OSCON : Day 1, Windows Just Doesn’t Do Cloud Foundry… but, there’s a fix for that…“. The rest of the week was most excellent. I caught up with friends and past coworkers. I heard about people working on some amazing new projects. Some things I will try […]

Architectural PaaS Cracks or Crack PaaS
Over the last couple years there have been two prominent open source PaaS Solutions come onto the market. Cloud Foundry & OpenShift. There’s been a lot of talk about these plays and the talk has slowly but steadily turned into traction. Large enterprises are picking these up and giving their developers and operations staff a …
Back in the Bosh Bunker
In the last post on the topic of Bosh I put together a simple Cloud Foundry environment using the tools & repos of Stark & Wayne. Even though the bootstrap is a great way to get an environment up and started, it doesn’t explain a lot of things about Bosh. So let’s take a look […]

Apprenda Shifts the Game on Polyglot Vs Best of Breed PaaS
One of the biggest battles raging in the PaaS world has been between the Polyglot and the Best of Breed camps. In the polyglot corner stands Heroku, Engine Yard and Cloud Foundry who all say that only a platform that gives an organization the ability to develop in multiple different

Tensions in the Cloud Foundry Camp–On the Problems with Forks
Let there be no doubt, open source projects are hard. Balancing central control while still allowing individual members a degree of autonomy is like walking a tightrope – too much control and it looks like a dictatorship, too little and the initiative risks spiraling out of control in the face

Engine Yard Differentiates through Control and Choice
I kind of feel sorry for Engine Yard sometime – once seen as one of the two best-known Platform as a Service offerings (alongside Heroku), the acquisition of Heroku by Salesforce kind of reduced Engine Yard’s visibility. The subsequent release of Cloud Foundry, and the significant uptake it has had in the marketplace have further […]

PaaS Pivot: Big Data At The Core Of Platform Services
As we go into 2013, I keep thinking about the evolution of the Platform as a Service and wonder what is in store for this segment this year. As Platform Services are one of my core focus areas of research, I thought I will start off this year with a post on this topic. For […]

Moving PaaS Beyond the Sound Bites in 2013
Most of the discussion around PaaS these days tends to focus on the rapid application deployment capabilities. That’s the easiest thing to demo in a 3-minute video so it tends to get the headlines. I believe that in 2013 we will move on from this eye candy and dig into some of the higher value […]

HP Announces Private PaaS Powered by Stackato
At HP’s Discover event here in Frankfurt today, the company will be announcing a private PaaS offering, built on top of Stackato, the PaaS which is itself a fork of the open source Cloud Foundry initiative. HP has entered into an agreement with ActiveState, the company behind Stackato, to OEM its platform and integrate it […]

Why CloudFoundry Spin Off Is Interesting
The rumors are true with VMware publicly announcing that CloudFoundry will be spun off as a separate organization along with EMC’s Greenplum and VMware’s vFabric. This unit will be headed by Paul Maritz, former CEO of VMware. This leaves VMware to focus on their Software Defined DataCenter initiative which they announced during last VMworld. I […]
Heroku Joins Cloud Foundry for Multi-PaaS Support from Appsecute
Let’s settle two things from the outset – firstly, PaaS is (I believe) the future of cloud services and will be the area for growth in the coming years. Secondly, I’m an investor and board member in Appsecute so I’m naturally bullish about what they’re doing. That said, today’s announcement

CloudFoundry Core May Not Be Important But CloudFoundry Is Important
Two weeks back I wrote a post arguing that CloudFoundry Core is not important. I had argued that even though CloudFoundry Core is done with an intention to make application portability seamless across various CloudFoundry deployments, the business considerations of PaaS vendors in the ecosystem will ensure that application portability is not a given. The […]

SITREP – Stoking Iron Foundry, Thor Hammering & Joining… ?
What have I been up to? Here’s a quick recap. You may want to get involved with some of these projects! Iron Foundry & Tier 3 Web Fabric Back when I left the kick ass team at Russell Investments in Seattle I stepped directly to bat as team lead at Tier 3. My job, get a […]

On VMware’s Cloud Foundry Core and PaaS Portability
Recently VMware announced Core, a baseline test that assesses how compatible an application is to the Cloud Foundry open source release. In order to derive this compatibility rating, Core is based on a base set of components – specific versions of runtimes and components that are currently within the Core stable. Krish Subramanian has written […]