Cloud Foundry - Open PaaS

VMware's Cloud Foundry is enormously significant. Like other PaaS products it removes the integration issues for middleware and automates deployments giving developers and admin significant productivity improvements.

If IaaS improved the productivity of the Data Centre "Platform as a Service" is going to improve developer and admin productivity.

But most other PaaS Products are proprietary and a lock-in to the vendor's platform. Hardly an attractive prospect no matter what the productivity improvement. Cloud Foundry works with multiple clouds, frameworks and services with the source code available to be understood, enhanced, modified or extended.
Look out for the eco-system of products and partners that will be build on this product. When the major open source application products like SugarCRM, Alfresco, Magnento etal supply versions that run on Cloud Fountry then this could really take-off and all the public clouds will have to offer the Cloud Foundry service.

If you look at the source you will see that alot of it is Ruby confirming my belief that Ruby will be important in building Cloud Infrastructure. EC2Dream is written 100% in Ruby. CloudFoundry has a command line client written in Ruby!! Also internally the client uses an http and JSON API to communicate with the cloud. Amazon Cloud Formation also uses http and JSON...

Cloud Foundry will be supplying a free Cloud Foundry Micro Cloud. Basically a downloaded VMware image for Cloud Foundry that can be run under VMware Player or Fusion (on Mac). This means you can build and unit test your application on your Desktop and then deploy to a Private or Public Cloud.

Interesting Redhat have released OpenShift which is similar to Cloud Foundry. It uses a Ruby-based Client Comand Line Interface. They have not open sourced the code (yet) and it will be initially available on Amazon EC2. Also they use git for source control while Cloud Foundry did not want to force users to use git.

In summary Proprietary PaaS, that is language specific (e.g. Ruby Heroku) or SaaS specific (e.g. VMForce), is not the future of PaaS. Open PaaS that supports a broad range of technologies and can also be deployed by Enterprises inside their firewalls is the future.....VMWare is definitely after enterprises with this technology. Within a few years enterprises will all be adopting this "deploy and scaling" approach to application execution.

Now there is a .NET implementation called Iron Foundry. Cloud Foundry now supports the most environments of any PaaS product!!

References
VMware Cloud Foundry: A Cloud Primer
PaaS Is The Future Of Cloud Services: Battle Lines Are Clearly Drawn
CloudFoundry Blogs, Reviews, Articles
VMware CloudFoundry: Ruby powered PaaS
VMware’s CloudFoundry and Red Hat’s OpenShift – Compare and Contrast
Try CloudFoundry on an AWS Micro instance
CloudFoundry Architecture - Part1
CloudFoundry Architecture - Part2
CloudFoundry DeepDive
From Righscale's blog
Slideshare
Cloud Foundry Live Webinar
Monitor your Rails app on VMWare’s Cloud Foundry
Monitoring VMware’s Cloud Foundry
DotCloud