Cloud Foundry: Life Is Too Short

Pivotal’s public cloud version of Cloud Foundry really struggles with the loose integration of third-party services. To appeal to ISVs and others with real-world complexity in their applications, Pivotal needs to identify a coherent product and concentrate on delivering something that works. I tried assiduously to use it and ultimately failed. In case you think …

Does the Cloud Need a New Programming Language?

The question of whether there is a specific cloud programming language has emerged in our internal discussions at TVP. We’ve noticed a tendency amongst “born in the cloud” companies like Cloud Physics to follow the example of Twitter and develop server-side components in the Scala programming language. Scala runs on the JVM and is supported by a significant number of PaaS, including CloudFoundry. Does this mean that enterprises moving to PaaS should now be coding in Scala?

AppFog – Extending the scope of Cloud Foundry

There is now a huge amount of movement in the area of what we have called “Diverse” Platform as a Service i.e. PaaS that delivers a number of different application infrastructure technologies on a mix-and-match basis and where there is no proprietary technology layer at any point in the platform stack. Amongst these we would include OpenShift, Cumulogic and CloudFoundry from our recent set of posts. AppFog sits in this category, and the fact that it has been recently renamed from PHPFog highlights a major trend in the space, the vendors typically start by developing a single technology, build an initial business plan and gain some market traction within that niche, and then move on to supporting a broader range of platforms.