Why would a Developer choose VMware?

It is interesting to see Edward’s comment that according to EMC/VMware, widespread production deployment of Cloud Apps is 3-5 years off. If that is the case the VMware CloudFoundry initiative should be focused on cutting-edge development rather than porting existing apps, and in much the same way that Microsoft has always courted developers, CloudFoundry should be the latest cool thing for developer productivity. It’s interesting to talk about this stuff in the abstract, and at the strategic level, but sometimes it’s worth understanding what happens when you need to make the decisions for yourself.

VMware’s CloudFoundry and Red Hat’s OpenShift – Compare and Contrast

Over the last few weeks, VMware (as we indicated in an earlier post) and Red Hat have initiated two very similar initiatives known respectively as CloudFoundry and OpenShift. These are Platform as a Service (PaaS) plays, being developed for the longer term, primarily looking to encourage the development of (and thereafter to provide infrastructure for) applications specificallysuited to the the cloud. In this article we compare and contrast the two offerings and discuss their significance for the PaaS market as a whole.

How to Use the Cloud for Development, Safely

When CloudFoundry was announced, my first thought was this is a nightmare waiting to happen. Why do I think this, because I was not thinking about Open Source developers but enterprise developers and the biggest issue with enterprise development is that the data used by developers is either made up data, but more often than not is actual production data. So the question becomes how can such data be protected when using PaaS public clouds?

ITaaS: Managing Software Costs within Hybrid Clouds

Managing licensing and utilization costs is a mess today in the physical world. Introducing elastic scaling of workloads into a hybrid private/public cloud introduces new uncertainties and new software licensing metering and compliance issues. This is particularly true in the case of enterprise applications which are licensed by the enterprise from the software vendor and then deployed on an as needed basis on Iaas or PaaS clouds.

Digging out after a Snowstorm: Similar to our virtual environments?

Sooner or later that perfect landscape of white is marred by new mounds of snow and clear-cut paths through it to the various locations on the property. When you look at these paths and the snow is high enough, they look like tunnels. The large tunnels (driveway) meet smaller and smaller ones. The perfect landscape of snow is now marred. This is just how a firewall looks when you put holes in it to let through various services. The more services, the more tunnels and paths will be cut. When speaking about the cloud or virtual environments, the increase in paths and entry points becomes a serious issue.

Red Hat Acquires PaaS Cloud vendor Makara to help compete with VMware’s vFabric

Red Hat today announced the acquisition of startup PaaS vendor, Makara, which provides a deployment platform for most of the Open Source application stacks onto most of the IaaS cloud infrastructures. Red Hat intends to use the purchased technology rather than the product itelf. It gains additional application-level management, monitoring and configuration functionality for an emerging stand-alone PaaS offering to drive its customers towards a fully RHEL-cloud.