We asked OpenStack recently whether they were going to do PaaS, they said that this was happening in the community around them, and today we have an announcement of one way of doing it: with VMware’s Open Source CloudFoundry.
The tagline is
“Bringing the worlds most popular open source IaaS and PaaS together.”
On first look, despite the missing apostrophe, we think this is a good marriage. The interesting questions are not around whether this could be done – (clearly it could), but who would be motivated to do it. The following information was provided by Piston Cloud
“With cooperation from VMware(R), Piston Cloud is developing the Cloud Provider Interface that integrates OpenStack cloud infrastructure with Cloud Foundry. The company will distribute and support this new integrated capability in a future release of Piston Enterprise OS.
Cloud Foundry is the leading open source platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering with a fast growing ecosystem and strong enterprise demand. OpenStack is a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists producing the ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. The integration takes advantage of Cloud Foundry BOSH, the recently announced open source tool chain for release engineering, deployment and life cycle management of very large scale instances of Cloud Foundry. The Piston Cloud development team will work closely with the VMware Cloud Foundry engineering team on this integrated OpenStack and Cloud Foundry community project over time.”
The new project will be submitted to the OpenStack satellite ecosystem for consideration as an OpenStack incubation project. The guys at Piston Cloud are all ex-NASA so given the history of OpenStack they have the inside track. Expect the project to be accepted.
Apparently VMware is happy about this. Jerry Chen, vice president of cloud and application services at VMware said. “It is vital to our customers that Cloud Foundry be a true multi-cloud offering. We look forward to supporting the engineering effort as well as our mutual customers.” In the short term it doesn’t seem to be in VMware’s interest, but in the long term it may be that VMware believes it stands more chance of dominating the PaaS space than the IaaS space, so it benefits from facilitating adoption of its PaaS on what looks like it might become the dominant non-proprietary IaaS platform.
On the Piston Cloud side this is all being spun around “Private Cloud” – other deployment options are, of course, possible. “Today’s private cloud solutions are poised to transform IT economics for the enterprise,” said Joshua McKenty, CEO and co-founder of Piston Cloud Computing, Inc. “With our joint commitment to open source development, VMware and Piston Cloud are driving this transformation forward.”
More information about the new project is at https://github.com/piston/openstack-bosh-cpi