VMware Releases Open Source Cloud Foundry 91
Julie188 writes "VMware shook the cloud world with an announcement that it was releasing an open source platform-as-a-service called Cloud Foundry. Not surprisingly, the new cloud platform takes direct aim at Microsoft's Azure and Google's Google Apps platforms. Cloud Foundry is made up of several technologies and products that VMware has acquired over the recent past and is released under an Apache 2 license. While VMware isn't the first-and-only player to launch an open source cloud initiative (Red Hat has DeltaCloud, Rackspace and Dell have OpenStack), some believe that with VMware now in the open source cloud business, pressure could be mounting for Microsoft and Google to release versions of their cloud that could be hosted somewhere other than their own data centers."
Public/Private/Hybrid (Score:5, Interesting)
Run your whole public cloud infrastructure and application fabric on the same technology platform as you use to manage your internal data centre.
This is a better by far option than Microsoft - who's idea is to land an Azure container at your doorstep. And it scales from the tiny to the gigantic.
The heart of this stack seems to be gold old Tomcat. The path to an application layer that is aware of on-demand elasticity seems very good.
Re:I must be old but... (Score:2, Interesting)
there are benefits to not owning your own servers. Cost being the biggest one.
Less labor costs, health care benefits, and retirement packages up front because someone else hires the monkeys to maintain the hardware. If you are a corporation, you have to pay taxes on all assets owned by the company. Not owning the hardware means less taxes to pay on assets. Less hardware also means less real estate you have to own to house that hardware, which in turn means less real estate taxes.
the savings goes on and on...electricity, water, HVAC equipment, etc... If the cost benefit is big enough, risk of handing over the keys becomes less of an issue.
Re:So let me get this straight... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, a big thing in cloud providers is that there is no red tape in provisioning. I go to EC2, fill out a one-time form to set up an account (about as complicated as buying a pair of shoes on the site), and I just pick an image and tell it how many servers of what size to fire up, and in a few minutes I have a list of DNS addresses to ssh into.
If I could have that at work it would be wonderful. Right now getting even a new virtual server seems to take forever. I'm all for resource accountability, but there is no reason provisioning should be so manual.
I'd love to see something like this at work. And, of course it gives you the ability to send peak demand offsite easily.
Re:I must be old but... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure if someone mentions it later, but the cost structure is an even bigger driver than most people realize. If you buy the servers and the software for them, that's classified as a capitalization expenditure, which means that only the depreciation of the asset can be deducted over time (most IT resources is 4 years). However, if you get the same thing as a service, it's fully deductible every year. Which means that cost-wise for the equipment, instead of a large upfront cost with many years to recoup the difference, you're getting it up front. For cash-strapped startups or even small and medium businesses, that's a huge deal.
Another benefit for publicly-traded companies in the US is SOX-compliance. Move the data/services to the cloud and the data-retention issue is now the provider's problem, not the company's.
Re:Op Ex. versus Cap Ex (Score:4, Interesting)
There's also the advantage of specialisation. Hosting 1 server is expensive. Hosting 10 servers costs about the same amount. Hosting 1,000 servers costs a lot less per server than hosting 10. There's no way that I could even get an Internet connection with the kind of throughput that a typical colo company offers for even the price of hosting, and that's ignoring the cost of power, the cost of the space, and so on. With a VPS it's even bigger. A lot of small companies only need 10% of a machine, but hosting that themselves would cost much more than renting it.
At some point, it becomes cheaper to move it in house. If you're a big company, then it definitely makes a lot of sense to host your own infrastructure.