VMware BOSH Takes Aim at Open Source PaaS Scalability

A year ago, VMware officially launched its open source CloudFoundry Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) project. Today VMware officially announced how they are opening up the platform even further in an effort to dominate the open source PaaS landscape.

“We see CloudFoundry as being the Linux of the cloud,” VMware CTO Steve Herrod said during a press conference on Wednesday

Herrod explained that Linux is a great operating system that provides a degree of application portability across multiple types of hardware architectures. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is the new hardware platform in Herrod’s view with multiple approaches. The idea behind the CloudFoundry PaaS is to enable a portability or abstraction layer that allows developers to leverage the power of IaaS, without worrying about the underlying differences across different IaaS platforms.

VMware is also improving the way that CloudFoundry can be leveraged for large scale deployments with the BOSH open source tool chain. BOSH is a tool for release engineering, deployment and lifecycle management of large scale distributed systems. Mark Lucovsky, VP engineering at VMware, noted that the challenge of deploying a large scale CloudFoundry deployment is no trivial task.

“You can’t run a system like this and have just a little man running around SSHing to various machines and deploying software, you really need a tool chain for that,” Lucovsky said.

Read the full story at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet:
VMware Wants CloudFoundry to be the Linux of the Cloud

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.