This week’s announcement by VMware of its CloudFoundry PaaS product was an exceptionally refreshing surprise. Other have commented that it’s a rare thing for a big company to really do things right – but with CloudFoundry, VMware have ticked every box – opensource? Yes, avoids lock-in? yes, value added? yes.

A quick recap of what CloudFoundry is, and does;

  • Open PaaS
  • Supports apps in Java, Rails, Node.JS
  • MongoDB, MySQL and Redis support
  • Use it public, private and cross infrastructure
  • No lock in (did I mention no lock in – this is BIG)

The comments among the clouderati were ebullient to say the least. Even the most cynical of souls, the ex-president of the private cloud himself, Christian Reilly, found himself getting excited;

ebullient

The comments from the blogosphere have been very positive – Krish (who has been testing CloudFoundry for some time) loves it, hell even Gartner, not normally quick to jump on latest developments, is positive. I see this through two different lenses, so here they both are;

For developers, end users and IT staffers everywhere

This is awesome – PaaS IS the future of cloud, providing more value than IaaS and more flexibility than SaaS. PaaS that gives users the ability to migrate, that lets them use their stuff wherever they like is truly golden. This is a big moment

For the vendors

This kind of hurts. No one has ever made any money from OpenSource (deliberate provocative statement that is very over stated but intended to get people thinking). We’ve seen a real commoditization of infrastructure over the past couple of years. That kind of culminated a week or so ago with the OpenCompute project launched by Facebook which OpenSourced their data centre design – great for some, but also creating yet another commodity layer with little opportunity for differentiation.

There is every chance that CloudFoundry (and the offerings that other vendors introduce in response – because they will) will further commoditize the market place – only this time higher up the stack where there was still money to be made. Simon Wardley in his inimitable style suggests that this is in fact the intention of VMware – Wardley couches this in terms of a;

huge moat devoid of differential value in the platform space and a vast ecosystem driving this

If this is the intention – I worry about the unintended consequences of commoditizing something ABOVE the layer in which your bread and butter lies – VMware runs the risk of cutting off it’s nose in spite of its face (cue a dodgy metaphor).

So… where does the real opportunity lie. Well as Wardley points out, the real money comes from the high touch stuff – brokerage, marketplaces and, ultimately, service. It’s the very reason Rackspace has invested so much in OpenStack (disclosure – Rackspace is a client) – they see the futility of fighting against a juggernaut of commoditization and rather look to steal the edge by getting in early in the services differentiation game.

Summary

CloudFoundry, like OpenStack before it are simply beautiful. Open is good. Moving up the stack with open is even better. I love what it means for the industry and dearly hope that vendors can see ways to avoid fighting a commodity battle but instead determine paths to providing customers with real value built on top of these commodity platforms.

To the cloud (oh yeah, I think someone already took that line). Ah well.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

1 Comment
  • Hey BK,

    I don’t know much about Cloud Foundry as it’s only been out for a few days, but I would perceive it as VMware re-positioning themselves in a changing market. I say good luck to them for embracing a community driven approach.

    As much as people knock VMware for their IaaS centric cloud-washing and their definitions of cloud computing being so centric on their own products, I still see VMware as a fundamental architecture that underpins the layers sitting above them. Rhetorical argument
    perhaps.

    People knock them now but face it, they accelerated the industry and the competition saw commiditisation of the hypervisor as the only attack option. That’s an ultimate compliment I’d say.

    So I hope to see VMware continuing to grow and thrive in ways that we haven’t imagined – hats off to them for vMotion – and Cloud Foundry – and what are they cooking up next?

    Disclaimer, I am biased because VMware are my history and I know them very well. Maybe they are destined to become the next “network layer”… the unsung heroes of the internet…. powering many things we take for granted like the beloved consumer SaaS/PaaS & anything higher up the stack-pplications, but also a point of blame for many things.

    But, as an infrastructure guy, gimmie Virtual Centre any day.

Leave a Reply to KimCancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.