During our tech watch activities, we regularly evaluate and prototype on Cloud platforms. In the aPaaS (Application Platform as a Service) category, we previously worked on Google App Engine and Amazon Elastic Beanstalk. Recently, we decided to investigate Cloud Foundry. This post describes our first high level impressions of the platform, and why it is relevant to an independent software vendor like us.
Open source & major vendors involvement
Cloud Foundry is completely open source, everything is on Github. The Cloud Foundry project is governed by a foundation where many major vendors of our industry are present, such as IBM, SAP, Intel, HP, VMware… Developers from these companies directly contribute to CF on Github. Some of these vendors also use CF as a foundation for their own PaaS offering. Examples of such offerings are IBM’s Bluemix, Pivotal Web Services, AppFog…
Members of the CF foundation at the time of this writing
This is very interesting for an ISV like us. If we offer products or services which are compatible with the CF model, it means we have a higher probability to be compatible with our client’s IT infrastructure and rules. For example, if our client is an IBM shop, we can deploy our solutions on BlueMix with no (or minimal) adaptations.
Deployment options
Another thing we like about CF is that it supports public, private and hybrid cloud models. CF is not the only PaaS to support this. For example, it is also the case for Google App Engine with products such as AppScale or CapeDwarf.
Again, this is quite important for an ISV as it does not impose a deployment model on our clients, who can be at various stages of their Cloud evolution. If they only accept a private cloud model, e.g. for security reasons, our products are compatible. If they are focused on cost reduction and want public cloud, we are compatible as well. If they want to mix and match, and for example have development and test environments in a public cloud and production in private cloud, it’s also possible.
Another interesting model is to have a cloud platform dedicated to a specific industry. Such a platform can take care of satisfying industry regulations, and offer industry specific services in its store (also called marketplace or service catalog). For example, Hybris is developing the [y]aaS cloud platform for the commerce industry, with services related to shopping cart management, order management…
Service model
The Cloud Foundry architecture has first class support for services. Service brokers register services and their usage plans, and the platform aggregates information from them to expose a service marketplace, or catalog. These services can then be provisioned and bound to applications. This is obviously very interesting for ISV wishing to offer some of their business solutions in a service model.
The marketplace of Pivotal Web Services
Today, the majority of services are quite technical, such as data storage, messaging, emailing… It will be quite interesting to see how higher level services, or business services, join the marketplaces in the future.