Episode 17 - "Cloud Foundry - The Application PaaS" + Show notes

The Cloudcast - Eps.17 - “Cloud Foundry - The Application PaaS”
Date: August 25, 2011
Guest Co-Host: Clint Greenwood (@cloudclint, http://www.actualclouds.com/)
Guests: Dave McCrory - Senior Architect for VMware Cloud Foundry (@mccrory, http://blog.mccrory.me/)

Dave McCrory did an excellent job of giving us an overview of Cloud Foundry, but couldn't answer all of our question because of some pending announcements at VMworld 2011 (next week). Never the less, we still had an excellent discussion about the vision, what's available today and what is motivating developers to look at Cloud Foundry.

Before we jumped into Cloud Foundry, Dave gave us a quick summary of his background as an entrepreneur (multiple start-ups) and why Rob Hirschfeld from Dell (@zehicle) said that they are the co-founders of Cloud Computing (from our Dell podcast)

Cloud Foundry was announced back April with a lot of buzz (rockstar team, open-source, new business model for VMware). Dave give us a high-level overview of Cloud Foundry and some sense of it’s status (Beta/GA, early adopters, etc.)

We talked about what makes Cloud Foundry unique in the crowed PaaS space - support for multiple language/platforms (Java, Ruby, node.js, Erlang, Scala, etc.) and completely open-source, so applications can run in Public, Private or Hybrid clouds.

We asked about the intersection between Cloud Foundry and any IaaS technology (such as VMware hypervisor or vCloud), but Dave told us that we'd need to wait until VMworld for more details.

Clint talked about how today's enterprises are mainly bifurcaste between .NET and Java for applications, and asked how developers were accepting a "polyglot platform" like Cloud Foundry. Dave gave us some insight about the growth of "shadow development" groups popping up in various customers (typically Ruby consultants, building mobile apps) that drive some of the early Cloud Foundry adopters.

We talked about some efforts by VMware to leverage interns and reach out to college programs to introduce Cloud Foundry into their Computing Science programs. Dave mentioned several programs that are already started.

Dave corrected our misunderstanding about "containers" and then walked us through how Cloud Foundry deals with single-tenancy, multi-tenacy and process-isolation. Below, Derek Collison (CTO, Cloud Foundry) provides some more details about the internal workings of Cloud Foundry, courtesy of CloudAve.

We discuss Dave's a concept called “Data Gravity” and the challenges of writing distributed applications that need to move data around. Dave gave us some insight into how Cloud Foundry can address portions of that issue, but also explains that some of it can't be easily solved.

We close the show by getting Dave's insight into what aspects of Cloud Foundry are most appealing to him as a developer (not just a VMware employee).

NOTE: Dave did not mention the recently announced "Cloud Foundry Micro Cloud", but the details are here. He also didn't mention the expanded language/framework support announced here.
More videos on Cloud Foundry's YouTube page are here