At an VMware-hosted event in Palo Alto, the Cloud Foundry team summarized their first year as an open source, multi-language Platform as a Service (PaaS). VMware CTO Steve Herrod pointed to the project’s strong developer adoption and thriving ecosystem as proof that this platform has staying power.
While VMware will not disclose the number of active Cloud Foundry customers, they did announce over 75,000 downloads and 3,300 forks and followers of their source code on GitHub. A sizable portion of today’s event was dedicated to new partners that recently announced support for Cloud Foundry. Cloud9 IDE, the popular web-based environment for JavaScript/Node.js development, has added the ability to target any Cloud Foundry environment as a deployment destination. Cloud9 has existing support for Joyent, Windows Azure and Heroku. Another partner, Collabnet has a set of tools for agile software projects and they introduced the option to deploy solutions to Cloud Foundry. Attendees at today’s event also saw a demo from SOASTA who walked through their CloudTest Lite® test creation and execution suite that now supports Cloud Foundry applications.
In addition to highlighting partners, VMware announced the availability of Cloud Foundry BOSH as well as a new source control system for CloudFoundry.org. BOSH, which has its source code available on GitHub, is a project designed to help automate large scale Cloud Foundry deployments. VMWare VP of Engineering Mark Lucovsky described BOSH as a tool for hardcore DevOps personnel who understand complex configurations and are looking to construct repeatable releases of Cloud Foundry. The source control process for Cloud Foundry is changing and Luckovsky outlined the new process at today’s event and in a blog post on CloudFoundry.org. Source code commits will now target an instance of web-based code review system Gerrit. On commit, a series of tests are run by a Jenkins instance and if the tests succeed, then the code is cycled through a review process before being pushed to GitHub.
While VMware was coy on the future of Cloud Foundry, their stated goal for 2012 was “more code, more community, more clouds.” The code for Cloud Foundry has undergone some significant underlying change since the launch one year ago. Many components have been added or refactored in order to improve scalability and reliability across the product. The Cloud Foundry ecosystem has also grown immensely with community contributions to all facets of the product, from new languages to bug fixes to supporting tools. There has been no shortage of Cloud Foundry “clouds” as multiple vendors such as appfog and Tier 3 have built commercial offerings of Cloud Foundry in their own data centers. Herrod claimed that the open source, portable nature of Cloud Foundry would make it the “Linux of the cloud” and so far, there are signs that he may be right.