Micro
Cloud Foundry – “Open PaaS” on your laptop – available today!
Only several months
have passed since VMware launched Cloud Foundry – 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 Foundry......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.
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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Imagine you're writing
a Spring based application, and to test it, you installed Tomcat on your laptop, and when you wrote some code, you could run
and test your code on your local Tomcat instance.
Your Tomcat instance would be the same as the Test and UAT and
PROD Tomcat servers your company has on the network, but instead of having to be connected to the network to do development
and testing, you could do it all locally, right there on your local machine. Imagine just how amazing that would be.
Okay, maybe it wouldn't
be amazing. Maybe it wouldn't even be different from what you've been doing for the last ten or twenty years. In fact, it'd
be pretty surprising if there was anyone out there using Tomcat that wasn't already doing that.
But if you're
a developer who lives primarily in the cloud, you probably don't have that same luxury. After all, if you're deploying to
the cloud, to really test your application, you need to connect to and deploy to the cloud. And in order to connect to the
cloud, well, you need a connection.
But not anymore. VMWare with Micro Cloud Foundry has now made it possible to actually run your external cloud environment
on your desktop. Micro Cloud Foundry is essentially "a full version of the CloudFoundry software, providing a symmetry
with other instances of CloudFoundry wherever they may be running. It's downloadable from CloudFoundry.com and runs on the
developer's laptop."
The big surprise is that this is the first environment of its kind allowing developers to run and test their cloud
based applications in the same manner as they would test WebSphere JBoss or Tomcat applications.
"For the Java developer,
it's something completely new. I can have the cloud on my laptop. I can take a Java or Spring or Rails application, drop it
into this micro-cloud foundry, have that running locally without ever having to configure databases or middleware software
that I might require for that app, and then push that app whenever I'm ready to scale out."
It's a tip of the hat
to VMWare and Cloud Foundry as far as their efforts go to help push the adoption of cloud technologies forward, but it's also
a reminder of how many of the things we take for granted as Java EE developers, namely the ability to develop and test locally,
are still glaringly nascent when it comes to leveraging a cloud based environment.
