It’s official. The Cloud Foundry Foundation has launched as an independent, nonprofit foundation to manage the global open standards for platform-as-a-service (PaaS) technology. The foundation will be managed as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project and will be governed by a team of open source experts from founding Platinum Members EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Pivotal, SAP, and VMware.
Cloud Foundry is currently the leading PaaS platform and has seen a 36 percent increase in community contributions over the past year, with more than 1,700 “pull requests” for contributions to the open development project. The Pivotal Cloud Foundry, IBM Bluemix, HP Helion, and Canopy Cloud Fabric are among the most notable deployments, thus far.
Larry Carvalho, PaaS research manager at market research firm IDC, said, “The announcement of the Cloud Foundry Foundation aims to improve transparency and speed technical innovation of the open source platform.” In addition, formalizing the foundation and gaining community participation, he explained, will help accelerate concepts to maturity, which in turn speeds delivery of open cloud-based solutions to customers.
DevOps and Dojo
The Cloud Foundry Foundation is poised to play an important role on the IT front in the months and years ahead, given the rise of the DevOps role in enterprises and the rising number of multi-cloud environments. IDC forecasts for PaaS are increasingly aggressive. In fact, the latest numbers predict a 27 percent annual growth rate in the market from 2013 to 2018.
“The industry has been in need of an OpenStack equivalent for the unique characteristics of PaaS, and Cloud Foundry Foundation has managed to rally broad participation among key application infrastructure players in short order,’’ said Charlotte Dunlap, a senior analyst at Current Analysis. “The formalization of Cloud Foundry as an industry standard will only help spur further PaaS adoption by providing additional reassurance to enterprises which are looking to speed app development and avoid vendor lock-in.”
The Cloud Foundry Foundation is still innovating, rolling out a new approach to open source development dubbed Dojo. Dojo aims to offer developers a fast track for commit rights, which can take over a year to gain in major projects. The nonprofit also plans to introduce a certification program in 2015 to ensure consistency and compatibility across Cloud Foundry-branded products and services.
A Very Big Deal
We caught up with Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, to get his thoughts on the Cloud Foundry launch as an independent nonprofit foundation. He told us the launch mainly formalized the efforts of the group’s members in determining a direction for their PaaS cloud development efforts.
“To their credit, the group’s founders recognized that the future and promise of cloud PaaS could only be realized through a truly collaborative effort. The launch signifies that the members of Cloud Foundry — EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Pivotal, SAP and VMware at the Platinum level, plus 40 others — have agreed on a set of common goals and best practices,” King said.
“That’s a very big deal given the existing competitive relationships between many members, and the complexity of the issues involved,” he added. “But its formal launch means that organizations that invest in Cloud Foundry-based solutions won’t be stuck in a proprietary no man’s land, and will enjoy an enormous range of choices in terms of vendors and offerings.”
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