On March 24th Pivotal announced that it will support deployments to Amazon Web Services (AWS) per ‘one click’ from its Cloud Foundry product.
 
 

So let’s dissect the press release in the usual news analysis format – the press released can be found here:

SAN FRANCISCO – March 24, 2015 – ​Pivotal​®, the creators of Cloud Foundry®, today announced that it will provide supported access to Pivotal Web Services, which includes cloud infrastructure, to enterprise subscription customers of ​Pivotal Cloud Foundry​®, the company’s cloud native application platform. Pivotal Cloud Foundry now includes one-click Amazon Web Services (AWS) installation integration, delivering Amazon customers the simplest path to their own dedicated Cloud Foundry platform on AWS. With today’s news, the industry’s ​fastest growing open source product​ ever extends its hybrid cloud offering with enterprise integration for hosted, public, and private clouds.

 
Pivotal Momentum in 2014

MyPOV – This is an important step for Cloud Foundry customers, who – after building their next generation applications in the product want to deploy these applications to different cloud platforms. With AWS Pivotal picked the obvious market leader for public cloud and has taken an important first step in the direction of being able to deploy Cloud Foundry built application to more cloud infrastructures. It will be interesting to see what Pivotal’s next steps will be, though likely it will be in the direction of OpenStack.

“With the latest Pivotal Cloud Foundry release, Pivotal becomes the first major middleware vendor to include managed public cloud capacity in a software subscription at no additional cost,” said James Watters, vice president and general manager, Cloud Platform Group at Pivotal. “By offering hosted public cloud along with dedicated self-install on either public or private clouds, Pivotal Cloud Foundry provides the instant-on affordable capacity ​Line of Business (LOB)​ executives need with the robust security and automation features IT can also bring to private clouds. With today’s release, LOB and IT can finally agree on a single platform.”

MyPOV – If Pivotal can create piece for LOB vs IT discussions and conflicts of interest remains to be seen – but this step gives Cloud Foundry customers more choices of deployment, and more choice gives more flexibility. And it is this flexibility customers need and want to deploy their next generation applications.

Delivering the One Cloud Platform Both Business and IT Can Agree On
LOB executives have championed the use of Pivotal’s hosted services, often in combination with Pivotal Labs agile development, to quickly deliver new digital products. IT executives value Pivotal Cloud Foundry’s ability to also run on private infrastructure. With our new hybrid cloud ready subscriptions LOB developers can start immediately on AWS while their private cloud build-outs complete, or run there entirely.
 
MyPOV – Pivotal raises an interesting point here – that enterprises can win time, use e.g. AWS for development and test – while the private cloud gets ramped up. Certainly a possible scenario – but what we have found in practice is, that for most next generation application use cases, enterprises cannot pull these apps back into private cloud as they need the elasticity of the public cloud to successfully run them.

Delivering AWS Customers the Best Path to Cloud Foundry
Today’s release also brings AWS virtual appliance support for Pivotal Cloud Foundry. With this feature, AWS customers can now natively deploy Cloud Foundry applications in hours on their AWS infrastructure. This complete hybrid cloud support lets operators migrate Cloud Foundry applications freely between public and private clouds, regardless of their underlying infrastructure.

MyPOV – This is a key value add with this Cloud Foundry release. The next logical question will be if Cloud Foundry applications can be logically partitioned across private and public cloud, allowing high utilization for private cloud resources and ‘bursting’ to the public cloud as needed. But one step at the time. First you need the capabilities of this release, or you need to walk before you can run.

Delivering Pivotal Cloud Foundry with the Cloud Infrastructure Included
Today, Pivotal customers can setup Pivotal Cloud Foundry under their own AWS account, or let Pivotal manage an AWS instance on their behalf by taking advantage of our new Pivotal Web Services with Enterprise Support. This new edition of Pivotal Cloud Foundry offers hosted application instances under a customer’s existing license at no extra cost. Pivotal Web Services is ideal for rapid deployments and avoids the administrative overhead of managing a public cloud infrastructure.
 
Pivotal Multi-Cloud Support Reality & Plans
MyPOV – Again Pivotal gives Cloud Foundry customers choice and choice is a good thing for customers. Allowing customers to either setup Cloud Foundry on their own account or have Pivotal do that for them gives customers more deployment choices. It will be interesting to see if Pivotal can support that duality for the next public cloud infrastructures that it will support. By then we will know also which deployment customers prefer overall or for which kind of projects.

Overall MyPOV

As easy PaaS vendors have made it for enterprises to build next generation application, it remains still hard for them to deploy these applications. Cloud infrastructure evolves rapidly and for enterprises to stay on top of them all the way to deploying their applications efficiently – is a huge challenge. Pivotal’s move makes it easier for enterprises to focus on their applications and how they can transform their business in the age of globalization and digital disruption – which is already a lot for enterprises to handle.

For Pivotal it means that the vendor now needs to create adoption and then deliver further public cloud deployment options. Issuing a roadmap on the next milestones is always something welcome by prospects, customers and the ecosystem. But as mentioned before – one step after another – you need to stand before you can walk, walk before you can run. Congrats to Pivotal for a key move making new PaaS investments deployed more easily to the (public) cloud.

More on Pivotal
 
  • News Analysis - Pivotal pivots to OpenSource and Hortonworks - Or: OpenSource keeps winning - read here

More on NextGeneration Applications::
 
  • Progress Report - Cloudera is all in with Hadoop - now off to verticals - read here
  • First Take - SAP Cloud for Planning - The next spreadsheet killer is off to a good start - read here
  • Market Move - Oracle buys Datalogix - moves into DaaS - read here
  • News Analysis - SAP commits to CloudFoundry and OpenStack - Key Steps - but what is the direction? Read here
  • Event Report - MongoDB is a showcase for the power of Open Source in the enterprise - read here
  • Musings - A manifesto: What are 'true' analytics? Read here
  • Future of Work - One Spreadsheet at the time - Informatica Springbok - read here
  • Musings - The Era of the no-design Database - Read here
  • Mendix - the other path to build software - read here
  • Musings - Time to ditch your datawarehouse .... - Read here
Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here.
2012, 2013, 2014 & 2015 (C) Holger Mueller - All Rights Reserved

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amazon, microsoft, cloud foundry, iaas, ibm, openshift, openstack, oracle, platform as a service, pivotal, salesforce