VMware today announced the beta availability of Micro Cloud Foundry, an open Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution that delivers access to high productivity frameworks and a rich ecosystem of application services from VMware, third parties and the open source community.
Micro Cloud Foundry is a complete version of Cloud Foundry that runs directly on a developers’ machine and offers developers choice of frameworks, choice of application infrastructure services and choice of clouds in which to deploy applications. Micro Cloud Foundry will be able to dramatically enhance developers’ abilities and options to build, test and deploy their applications while offering symmetry with other instances of Cloud Foundry in enterprise datacenters and public cloud service providers.
“VMware recognizes there is a new generation of developers looking for a simpler approach to building and testing their applications,” said Charlotte Dunlap, Sr. Analyst with Current Analysis. “With this technology, VMware supports the growing need for developers to work on their laptops with an open, lightweight platform that minimizes configuration requirements and speeds application development.”
Because Micro Cloud Foundry runs in a local virtual machine, developers can easily create and experiment with cutting-edge applications on their own computers, a model consistent with traditional development processes, but lacking from current PaaS models. As a result, developers can eliminate the need to install and configure complex application infrastructure and thereby greatly accelerate their application development process. Additionally because applications created on Micro Cloud Foundry can be deployed directly to www.cloudfoundry.com or other instances of Cloud Foundry, it enables true application portability across a range of cloud environments.
“Today VMware is taking another significant step forward in delivering a modern cloud application platform ideal for the hybrid cloud environment, by delivering industry’s only PaaS solution that can be run on an individual developer’s laptop,” said Jerry Chen, vice president of cloud and application services, VMware. “Micro Cloud Foundry gives developers a full cloud development environment that combines all the flexibility of local development with the ability to deploy and scale their applications anywhere in the future. Micro CloudFoundry gives developers the ability to build cutting edge cloud applications while exploring the latest developer frameworks and application services without configuration hassles.”
Support for High-Productivity Programming Frameworks
The first version of Micro Cloud Foundry supports popular, high-productivity programming frameworks and application services including:
• Spring for Java
• Ruby on Rails and Sinatra
• Node.js
• Grails and other JVM-based frameworks including Scala Lift
• MongoDB, MySQL, and Redis application services
• VMware plans to include support for additional VMware vFabric services in future versions
Micro Cloud Foundry supports Cloud Foundry’s scriptable command line interface and integration with the Eclipse-based SpringSource Tool Suite (STS), which allows developers to retarget deployments between on-premise and public environments without code modifications.
With built-in dynamic DNS support, developers can run their Micro Cloud Foundry wherever they happen to be working — whether at home, office or coffee shop — without any reconfiguration required.
Available as a downloadable virtual machine image, Micro Cloud Foundry is compatible with VMware Fusion for Mac OS X and VMware Workstation and VMware Player (available as a free download) for Linux and Windows computers. It provides easy installation, setup, and virtual machine management.
Significant Adoption by the Developer Community
Micro Cloud Foundry is the third element of Cloud Foundry to become available. The first two, which debuted on April 12, 2011, are CloudFoundry.com, a public cloud PaaS environment; and CloudFoundry.org, an open source project that allows developers and community members to collaborate and contribute to the Cloud Foundry project.
CloudFoundry.org has already received hundreds of material contributions from the open source community, including additional frameworks and languages such as Erlang, JRuby, PHP and Python as well as data services such as Neo4J.