Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer
Only a few months have passed since VMware launched Cloud FoundryTM - the industry’s first open platform as a service implementation and a major milestone in our mission to “Simplify IT”. Cloud Foundry debuted with both the CloudFoundry.com service and as an open source project via CloudFoundry.org.
We’ve promised to shortly deliver a version of Cloud Foundry that will run in a single virtual machine. We call it Micro Cloud FoundryTM and its BETA availability is accessible today at http://micro.cloudfoundry.com
As outlined in a previous post, Cloud Foundry is all about choice - choice of developer frameworks, choice of application infrastructure services, and choice of clouds to which to deploy applications.
By offering an open architecture in all three dimensions, Cloud Foundry greatly simplify the lives of developers and makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications.
“Honey, we shrank the Cloud”
Today we are taking the next step toward providing developers what they need - a simple PaaS solution you can quickly download and install on your machine.
Micro Cloud Foundry is a downloadable version of Cloud Foundry that can run on a developer’s laptop. It contains a version of the Cloud Foundry software and offers symmetry with other instances of Cloud Foundry. It allows access to modern frameworks and a rich ecosystem of application services from VMware, third parties and the open source community. Applications deployed on Micro Cloud Foundry will run with minimal modification on any private or public cloud running Cloud Foundry, thus demonstrating a true Hybrid Cloud solution.
Many developers are already using the Cloud Foundry open source bits to build their local versions of Cloud Foundry. Micro Cloud Foundry will make this process significantly easier and will enable developers to easily “shrink the cloud” to their local machine and experiment with cutting edge technologies without the hassles of installations and configurations.
What is included in Micro Cloud Foundry?
Micro Cloud Foundry supports Java on Spring, Ruby on Rails/Sinatra and Node.JS frameworks as well as MySQL, MongoDB and Redis services. It supports both Cloud Foundry’s scriptable command line interface (vmc) and integration with the Eclipse-based SpringSource Tool Suite (STS). This allows developers to retarget deployments between on-premise and public environment without code modifications.
With built-in dynamic DNS support, developers can run their micro cloud wherever they happen to be working – whether at home, office or coffee shop – without any reconfiguration required.
Micro Cloud Foundry is available as a downloadable virtual machine image compatible with VMware Fusion for MacOSX, VMware Workstation and VMware Player (available as a free download) for Linux and Windows. It provides an easy install, setup and VM management mechanisms.
Micro Cloud Foundry is a developer focused offering, designed to support development and testing use-cases. VMware will provide frequent Micro Cloud Foundry updates to include additional frameworks and services. Micro Cloud Foundry is currently a beta offering and is free of charge.
For more details on what’s under the covers with Micro Cloud Foundry, please refer to the Cloud Foundry blog at http://blog.cloudfoundry.com
How is the Cloud Foundry project evolving?
Over the past few months, we have experienced outstanding interest in Cloud Foundry, both at the CloudFoudry.com service, the CloudFoundry.org project and the Cloud Foundry ecosystem.
The interest in CloudFoundry.com continues to grow with the number of beta users more than doubling since last quarter and the number of applications increasing over 3x. These applications leverage a wide variety of development frameworks, including Java on Spring, Ruby on Rails, Ruby on Sinatra, Node.js, Grails and Scala on Lift. CloudFoundry.com users continues to increase their usage of the ecosystem services, including MySQL, Redis and MongoDB.
The interested in CloudFoundry.org from the open source community has been incredible. We have received hundreds of community contributions to the open source project, including new frameworks and languages like Erlang and JRuby as well as some early projects around PHP and Python and data services like Neo4J.
The Cloud Foundry ecosystem is growing quickly with increasing number of technology partners, working with us to expand the developers frameworks, application services and deployment destinations available for Cloud Foundry users.
VMware continues to drive core innovation to CloudFoundry.com by adding new frameworks and languages like Scala and Lift as well as services like RabbitMQ Cloud Messaging and a free Hyperic plugin to provide increased monitoring and visibility to applications.
Happier Coding
Developers can continue to avoid the many hassles of updating machines and configuring middleware and focus their attention on delivering applications, today in their own laptop or desktop behind the corporate firewall.
For more information on Cloud Foundry, and to download your Micro Cloud Foundry, please visit http://www.CloudFoundry.com