Saturday, May 14, 2011

What is Cloud Foundry??

One can see lot of enthusiasm about Cloud foundry, Vmware's latest offering.

Okay cut it short, in layman's terms what is it?

To first understand this let's look at some terminologies

What is Saas and Paas?, I hear these too often these days

Using Salesforce.com as an example - they offer the Force.com platform, which provides a database, a programming language, integration features and so on. You can use this platform to build whatever you need/like.

Salesforce also offer their own, prebuilt CRM applications - this is software-as-a-service as the application has been built for you, you simply start using it.

PaaS provides you with the components and tools to build something; SaaS provides you a prebuilt application you can pick up and use straight away. The line can be blurred - again, using the Salesforce example, you can tailor their SaaS offerings by using some of their PaaS technologies.

Okay fine we get an idea of Paas and Saas,

But what exactly are these public and private clouds?

A public cloud is offered as a service via web applications/web services( usually over an Internet connection). Private cloud and internal cloud are deployed inside the firewall and managed by the user organization.

There is another type of cloud, hybrid cloud. A hybrid cloud environment consisting of multiple internal and/or external providers will be typical for most enterprises.
Check this interesting link

Okay this warmed me up a bit, so what is Cloud Foundry now?, should I even care?

Well you should definitely care because of vmware's midas touch :) on any product. But on a serious note it is a great effort to bring multiple frameworks, services, clouds etc under a single roof. Let me explain..

For development of applications running in the cloud there are various options. Google App Engine, Force.com and Microsoft Azure are some big names. They all use their own development platform which means customers on that platform cannot switch to another cloud provider without having to rewrite the application code. The code is stuck to the platform of the provider. It is a bit like having an electric appliance which can only be used with a specific electricity company. If the electricity company has many outages or raises the price of power, you cannot switch to another company. The common name for this is vendor lock-on or Hotel California. You can check in but you cannot check out. The provider will lure you with low prices and when enough customers are in, prices are raised to be able to have a healthy economic model and deliver good return for investors and shareholders.

VMware announced it’s own application development platform called Cloud Foundry in April. It is based on open source software. It can be described as a layer which sits between the cloud provider infrastructure (computing resources) and the software used for development.

As it is open source the application can run on cloud providers which support Cloud Foundry. Even when the cloud provider does not run VMware vSphere as it’s underlying virtualization platform. So if the cloud provider does not comply to SLA’s or raises the price, the app can be moved quite easily to another provider without having to rewrite the app. Wow isn't this super cool, I feel it is kind of moving from dictatorship to democracy :).

Cloud Foundry supports MySQL, MongoDB and Redis [and in] coming months, they claim they would add support for other application services. In the initial release, Spring for Java, Rails and Sinatra for Ruby and Node.js are supported. The system also supports other JVM-based frameworks such as Grails.

Is it Open Source? But Of Course

Cloud Foundry is an open source project with a community and source code today at www.cloudfoundry.org.

You can also check this link

In the next post will try to go in more details about the Cloud Foundry architecture.

Again aim here is to explain in simple terms the technology. Feedback is always appreciated.



9 comments:

  1. Indeed a good article in very simple words. Keep writing more.

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  2. Do you have details about how cloudfoundry can be made to interoperate with non vSphere backend platform? Specifically, can we make it interoperate with physical (non virtualized) server rack? If so, how? Haven't been able to find answer to that one.

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  3. Thank you for sharing I'll definitely check them out.
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  4. But virtualization is NOT necessarily a cloud. It provides an easier way to manage virtual resources. After virtualizing an environment, nothing happens. We need software tools make the cloud elastic and to be able to bill (pay-per-use)

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  5. Thanks for any other great article. Where else may anyone get that kind of info in such a perfect method of writing? I have a presentation subsequent week, and I’m at the search for such info.


    What is SAAS

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  6. Thanks for sharing ... May be couple of pictures would be great to further drive the points home ...

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    ReplyDelete