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PaaS

VMware Debuts Cloud Foundry, An Open PaaS

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VMware recently delivered Cloud Foundry, according to the company the industry’s first open Platform as a Service (PaaS) and a new generation of application platform, architected specifically for cloud computing environments and delivered as a service from enterprise datacenters and public cloud service providers.

Cloud Foundry streamlines the development, delivery and operations of modern applications, significantly enhancing the ability of developers to deploy, run and scale their applications in cloud environments while embracing the widest choice of public and private clouds, industry-standard high productivity developer frameworks and application infrastructure services.

VMware introduced a new VMware-operated developer cloud service, a new open source PaaS project and a “Micro Cloud” PaaS solution.

Cloud Foundry supports popular, high productivity programming frameworks, including Spring for Java, Ruby on Rails, Sinatra for Ruby and Node.js, as well as support for other JVM-based frameworks including Grails. The open architecture will enable additional programming frameworks to be rapidly supported in the future.

For application services, Cloud Foundry will initially support the MongoDB, MySQL and Redis databases with planned support for VMware vFabric services.

Cloud Foundry is not tied to any single cloud environment, nor does it require a VMware infrastructure to operate.

2011 Will Be the Year of Platform-as-a-Service: Gartner

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All the leading enterprise software vendors, as well as large cloud specialists, will introduce new platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings this year, making 2011 the year of PaaS, according to Gartner.

“By the end of 2011, the battle for leadership in PaaS and the key PaaS segments will engulf the software industry,” said Yefim Natis, vice president at Gartner. “Early consolidation of specialized PaaS offerings into PaaS suites will also be evident. New vendors will enter the market through acquisitions or in-house development. Users can expect a wave of innovation and hype. It will be harder to find a consistent message, standards or clear winning vendors.”

PaaS is a common reference to the layer of cloud technology architecture that contains all application infrastructure services, which are also known as “middleware” in other contexts.

PaaS is the middle layer of the software stack “in the cloud.” It is the technology that intermediates between the underlying system infrastructure (operating systems, networks, virtualization, storage, etc.) and overlaying application software. The technology services that are part of a full-scope PaaS include functionality of application containers, application development tools, database management systems, integration brokers, portals, business process management and many others — all offered as a service.

Today’s PaaS offerings come in a over a dozen of specialized types; however, during the next three years, the variety of PaaS specialist-subset offerings will consolidate to a few major application infrastructure service suites, and, over a longer time, comprehensive, full-scale PaaS offerings will emerge as well.

Gartner believes that during the next five years, the adoption of PaaS in most midsize and large organizations will not lead to a wholesale transition to cloud computing. Instead, it will be an extension of the use patterns of on-premises application infrastructures to hybrid computing models where on-premises application infrastructures and PaaS will coexist, interoperate and integrate.

Gartner predicts that by 2015, most enterprises will have part of their run-the-business software functionally executing in the cloud, using PaaS services or technologies directly or indirectly. Most such enterprises, will have a hybrid environment in which internal and external services are combined.

SpringSource Snapped Up By VMware

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(We’re playing catch-up on news due to holiday, apologies for the late notices)

VMware recently announced a major step forward in its journey to help simplify IT by entering into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held SpringSource, a leader in enterprise and web application development and management.  VMware and SpringSource, itself an acquiring party earlier this year when it purchased Hyperic, plan to deliver compelling new solutions that enable companies to more efficiently build, run and manage applications within both internal and external cloud architectures.

VMware will acquire SpringSource for approximately $362 million in cash and equity plus the assumption of approximately $58 million of unvested stock and options. The acquisition has been approved by SpringSource’s stockholders and is expected to close in the third quarter of 2009, subject to customary closing conditions.

SpringSource is the innovator and driving force behind some of the most popular and fastest growing open source developer communities, application frameworks, runtimes, and management tools.  In just five years, SpringSource has established a presence in a majority of the Global 2000 companies, and is rapidly delivering a new generation of commercial products and services. VMware plans to continue to support the principles that have made SpringSource solutions popular: the interoperability of SpringSource software with a wide variety of middleware software, and the open source model that is important to the developer community.

Together, VMware and SpringSource plan to further innovate and develop integrated Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions that can be hosted at customer datacenters or at cloud service providers.  These solutions will allow customers to rapidly build new enterprise and web applications and run and manage these applications in the same dynamic, scalable and cost-efficient vSphere-based internal or external clouds that can also host and manage their existing applications, providing an evolutionary path to the future.

Can We Stop Hyping The Cloud Yet ?

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The past six to nine months we’ve seen the rapid invasion of the Cloud, Cloud Computing or a variant including Cloud. We’ve had different Barcamp style Cloudcamps, there are bloggers rebranding their virtualization blog to a cloudblog and there are new aggregators popping that gather all cloudy news.

Now let’s face it, there is absolutely nothing new on the horizon.
The cloud terminology has been coined by the marketing people, you know the weird folks in suits that are a bit uncomfortable at campstyle events, yep those guys. Oh well.. not all of them are like that 🙂

When Amazon had an overstock of machines in the summer of 2002 they launched Amazon Web Services and for a lot of people that was the start of what today they call Cloud Computing. Their Server as a Service , the Elastic Compute Cloud, also known as “EC2”, The idea that you can launch a Virtual Machine somewhere remotely, manage it via an API and Pay As You Use .

So in came the abbreviations, SAAS, Software as a Service, the new business model for a lot of software vendors, PAAS , Platform As A Service, the new service for the ISP’s. And SOSAAS, Same Old Software as a Service

But the strange thing is that the idea wasn’t Amazon’s in the first place.

If you would read the following project description :
“The project is building a public infrastructure for wide-area distributed computing. We envisage a world in which execution platforms will be scattered across the globe and available for any member of the public to submit code for execution. The sponsor of the code will be billed for all the resources used or reserved during the course of execution. This will serve to encourage load balancing, limit congestion, and hopefully even make the platform self-financing.”

You’d think Amazon wouldn’t you ? Wrong bet, The above text is coming straight from the Xenoservers project at the University of Cambridge yes, the project that eventually lead to the development of the Xen Virtual Machine Monitor, on which coincidentally Amazon EC2 is based.

But was this the first form of distributed deployment of user resources. ?
Reuven, Mr Cloud, thinks not ,

Even way back then the criminal syndicates had developed “service oriented architectures” and federated id systems including advanced encryption. It has taken more then 10 years before we actually started to see this type of sophisticated decentralization to start being adopted by traditional enterprises.

So the script kiddies had a whole cloud of dynamically on demand deployable instances of hosts where they could deploy their malware. No Pay As You Go, and certainly no fuzz about which licenses needed to be bought.

Just as in today’s Clouds, on of the reasons why the cloud is getting so popular is that people using it don’t have to think about how many extra software licenses, the biggest part of it’s underlying technology is Open Source, not a non scalable, proprietary platform

The cloud to me is the mix of Virtualization, Scalability, Automation , Open Source, Large Scale Deployment , playing the puppetmaster, and High Availability .. and let it be the Virtualization part and the Management of Virtual environments which I cover for Virtualization.com

So yes you’ll be reading more cloud news here, as after all part of it is just plain old Virtualization, or SAAS, or Thin Client

Thin Cloud Computing

Countdown For The Business Technology Summit (India)

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The power team for Workhorse IT – SOA & Web Services, SaaS/PaaS, Virtualization and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) – will be center stage at Saltmarch Media‘s Business Technology Summit, for which Virtualization.com is proud to be one of the media sponsors.

The premier annual gathering for business technology stakeholders from across the world, the 2008 edition of Business Technology Summit will be held September 22-26 in Bangalore and Mumbai. (Also make sure you check out our Events page)

Expected to attend the four day conference and expo will be nearly 800 decision makers, analysts, product managers, architects, engineers, project managers, designers, developers, programmers, entrepreneurs, VC, marketers and business strategists – who are embracing the opportunities created by these mature and workhorse enterprise technologies. The attendee spectrum will also encompass the IT Channel – Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), Value Added Resellers (VARs), System Integrators (SIs), and Distributors.

Centered around the theme of “Riding the Workhorse IT Hockey Stick”, BT Summit features four co-located tracks — SOA & Web Services, SaaS/PaaS, that offer complimentary synergistic for a robust IT infrastructure that no IT decision-maker, manager, architect or professional can afford to ignore in their quest for business technology success. Attendees to the summit will be able to attend talks from all four tracks.

Speakers, handpicked by the BT Summit chair, include Alan Pelz-Sharpe (ECM Analyst), Chris Harding (SOA Visionary), Peter Coffee (SaaS/PaaS Expert), Ismael Ghalimi (BPM Pioneer) Robert Marcus (Grid Visionary), Matjaz B. Juric (BPEL Mentor) Ravi Gururaj (Founder, VMLogix), Morris Panner (SaaS Workflow Expert) Sasa Ana (SOA Researcher) Nitin Borwankar (Father of Data 2.0), Hans de Groot (Web Globalization Expert).

In addition to keynotes, power panels, focussed sessions, and hands-on workshops over four days, one of the best reasons to attend BT Summit is the vibrant exhibition, which features leading business technology companies and their projects and services. Intalio, SDL Tridion, Progress Software and OpenAir among others are sponsors at the summit. Business Technology Summit sponsorship information is available here.