Microsoft is joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation as a gold member, in the latest instance of the company embracing open source under the leadership of CEO Sayta Nadella. The move also further cements Cloud Foundry's market position as a leading multi-cloud PaaS (platform as a service).
Azure's director of compute, Corey Sanders, explained Microsoft's rationale in a blog post:
The partnership with the Cloud Foundry Foundation extends our commitment to deeply collaborate and innovate in the open community. We remain committed to create a diverse and open technology ecosystem, to offer you the freedom to deploy the application solution you want on the cloud platform you prefer.
"It's a key and overdue move by Microsoft to join the at-the-moment winning PaaS platform," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. Cloud Foundry "gives enterprises load portability over all the major cloud platforms out there: AWS, Google, Microsoft, and if you want, even IBM and SAP," he adds.
While Microsoft had already been involved with Cloud Foundry on a project level, and the PaaS has been available on Azure since 2005, joining the Foundation means more than the $100,000 annual membership fee. Microsoft will step up its involvement and investment of resources into Cloud Foundry's development, as Sanders described:
In addition to joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation, we are also extending Cloud Foundry integration with Azure. This includes back-end integration with Azure Database (PostgreSQL and MySQL) and cloud broker support for SQL Database, Service Bus, and Cosmos DB. We even included the Cloud Foundry CLI in the tools available in the Cloud Shell for easy CF management in seconds.
With our joining of the Cloud Foundry Foundation and the capabilities listed above I hope you find Azure offers the best place for deploying portable and open Cloud Foundry applications without any lock-in.
Cloud Foundry initially landed on Amazon Web Services, but AWS has yet to formally join the Foundation. That could obviously change at any time, but meanwhile, other likely candidates to join include Oracle, which offers a competing PaaS—that like Cloud Foundry, is polyglot but emphasizes Java—but also wants to drive workloads toward its general-purpose IaaS (infrastructure as a service) offering.
This week, the Cloud Foundry Foundation Foundation released a number of data points highlighting Cloud Foundry's momentum. Among the highlights:
- More than 5,000 developers have already gone through a certification program announced in March.
- There have been 51,000 code commits in the past year.
- Cloud Foundry has 35 percent of the PaaS market spanning both cloud and on-premises deployments.
Microsoft's announcements this week can be seen more examples of the company trying to be customer-friendly by embracing open source, but it's also pragmatic. Azure has become an increasingly popular target for Cloud Foundry deployments, and it therefore behooves Redmond from a business perspective to increase its investment in related tooling and integration.
But Cloud Foundry's ability to draw interest and support from so many cloud vendors also speaks to where buyers increasingly want to go.
"Cloud Foundry is the proof that enterprises want multi-cloud support, at least on paper," Mueller says. "They are not realizing this right away in most projects."
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