Open Source PaaS
Going forward, PaaS may have more of an open-source flavor, if VMware can leverage its weight and influence.
Just this month, VMware unveiled Cloud Foundry, which the vendor calls the industry's first open PaaS implementation.
Cloud Foundry provides a PaaS implementation that offers developers what they need: choice, noted Steve Herrod, VMware's CTO, in his blog, Cloud Foundry -- Delivering on VMware's "Open PaaS" Strategy .
Herrod said choice consists of:
- choice of developer frameworks
- choice of application infrastructure services
- choice of clouds to which to deploy applications
"By offering an open architecture in all three dimensions, Cloud Foundry overcomes major limitations found in today's PaaS solutions," he said. "Nascent industry PaaS offerings are held back by limited or non-standard framework support, lack of variety of application services and especially the inability to deploy applications across both public and private clouds."