I get press releases every week about some new (or old!) company and their so-called cloud solution. Some folks are clearly abusing the popularity of the “cloud” buzzword, and others are actually doing interesting things with distributed computing, infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service, orchestration, and related technologies. Amazon is the prime mover on IaaS, but OpenStack, CloudStack and Eucalyptus are all making strong plays in that space. VMware’s Cloud Foundry and Red Hat’s OpenShift are pushing open source PaaS, while services like Heroku, Engine Yard and dotCloud (among others) are pushing to be your hosted PaaS solution.
It’s not surprising that so many people are looking to differentiate their cloud solutions, and on the balance I think competition is a good thing that eventually benefits end-users. But as things stand today, it strikes me as exceedingly hard to formulate a comprehensive “cloud strategy” given the plethora of options. → Read More
VMware, whose core products specialize in virtualizing Windows and Linux workloads, is making some interesting maneuvers in the Platform as a Service (PaaS) space with their Cloud Foundry offering.
CloudFoundry.com is a hosted PaaS solution, in which people can deploy and run their web apps without ever mucking around with the underlying OS or application stack. There’s also the Micro Cloud Foundry, which is a virtual machine image you can deploy on your own hardware to set up your own Cloud Foundry PaaS. Going even further, the software that powers Cloud Foundry is open source and available on GitHub under an Apache Software License, so anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of PaaS can check it out.
It’s extremely interesting to me that VMware, a company that makes gobs of money by selling complex proprietary software, has so boldly embraced the free software development model for their PaaS offering. It’s also worth noting that the other major Linux PaaS offering, Red Hat’s OpenShift, is not yet open source.
But that’s not all. → Read More
Red Hat’s OpenShift platform as a service offering has been in public beta for a while now. It offers a fairly simple way for people to jumpstart “cloud” development efforts by abstracting out all the messy business of setting up application and database servers. Instead, you simply publish your source code to OpenShift, and their platform does the rest. Supported languages are those used heavily by nimble, agile startup types: PHP, Python, Ruby. Interestingly, OpenShift also supports Java. That’s not a language that many people associate with cloud solutions. Today, Red Hat is announcing that they’re improving their support of Java on OpenShift with support for “full Java lifecycle for developers”.
I spoke with Issac Roth, Red Hat’s PaaS Master (a groovy title, if ever there was one) and Jason Anderson, from Red Hat’s middleware team, about the announcement. According to Roth, OpenShift has always aimed to support those technologies used by open source developers — usually the “P” in the LAMP stack, as well as Ruby. But Red Hat also wants to support enterprise developers, and wants to help enterprise developers get working on cloud solutions using their preferred language. They’re doing that in a couple of ways, with today’s announcement. → Read More
Engine Yard, a provider of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions, this morning announced it has acquired Orchestra, developer of a platform for deploying, scaling and managing PHP applications.
Engine Yard, which is backed by investors like Benchmark Capital, New Enterprise Associates, and Amazon.com, opted not to disclose the financial terms of the acquisition. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
