Frequently Asked Questions

Cloud Foundry is an open platform as a service, providing a choice of clouds, developer frameworks and application services. Initiated by VMware, with broad industry support, Cloud Foundry makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications. It is an open source project and is available through a variety of private cloud distributions and public cloud instances, including CloudFoundry.com.

Cloud Foundry will be available as:

• CloudFoundry.com  — a complete hosted PaaS environment
• CloudFoundry.org  — an open source project where developers and community members can collaborate and contribute to the project.
• Micro Cloud Foundry — a complete version of Cloud Foundry that runs in a virtual machine on a developer’s Mac or PC.

CloudFoundry.com is a public instance of Cloud Foundry operated by VMware, running on vSphere infrastructure. CloudFoundry.com supports the Spring, Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, Scala and node.js frameworks. CloudFoundry.com supports vFabric Postgres, vFabric RabbitMQ, MongoDB, MySQL and Redis. Other Cloud Foundry Instances may vary in what frameworks and app services they choose to support.

The open-source community site, CloudFoundry.org, is the community where developers can collaborate and contribute to the Cloud Foundry project. For a full catalog of software services available in the open source stack, please refer to the community website at CloudFoundry.org.

Micro Cloud Foundry is a downloadable version of Cloud Foundry that can run on a developer's laptop. Micro Cloud Foundry contains a version of the Cloud Foundry software and offers symmetry with other instances of Cloud Foundry. It allows access to modern frameworks and a rich ecosystem of application services from VMware, third parties and the open source community. Applications deployed on Micro Cloud Foundry will run with minimal modification on any private or public cloud running Cloud Foundry.

For more information and to download your Micro Cloud Foundry, please click here.

Cloud Foundry is a cloud-era application platform which includes a self-service application execution engine, an automation engine for application deployment and lifecycle management, a scriptable command line interface (CLI), integration with development tools to ease development and deployment processes and an open architecture for quick development framework integration, application services interface and cloud provider interface.

At this time, CloudFoundry.com (the public instance of Cloud Foundry operated by VMware) supports applications written in Spring Java, Rails and Sinatra for Ruby, Node.js. Scala and other JVM languages/frameworks including Groovy and Grails. In addition, the Cloud Foundry open source project (available at www.cloudfoundry.org ) offers additional languages/frameworks support via partners including PHP, Python, .NET and more. For additional information please refer to the Cloud Foundry blog at blog.cloudfoundry.com.

At this time, CloudFoundry.com (the public instance of Cloud Foundry operated by VMware) supports vFabric Postgres, vFabric RabbitMQ and Redis. Additional services are available from the open source community including MySQL and MongoDB. Other Cloud Foundry Instances may vary in what frameworks and app services they choose to support. For additional information please refer to the Cloud Foundry blog at blog.cloudfoundry.com.

Cloud Foundry is ideal for any developer interested in removing the cost and complexity of configuring infrastructure and runtime environments for their applications without locking themselves into a single cloud. Developers can deploy their applications to Cloud Foundry using their existing tools and with zero modification to their code.

Cloud Foundry allows developers to focus on applications, not machines or middleware. Traditional application deployments require developers to configure and patch systems, maintain middleware and worry about network topologies. Cloud Foundry allows you to focus on your application, not infrastructure, and deploy and scale applications in seconds.

Cloud Foundry takes an open approach to Platform as a Service. Most PaaS offerings restrict developer choices of frameworks, application infrastructure services and deployment clouds. The open and extensible nature of Cloud Foundry means developers will not be locked into a single framework, single set of application services or a single cloud.

The Cloud Foundry initiative has multiple offerings. The VMware operated and managed CloudFoundry.com is in beta and can be accessed for free. Users of the beta service will be notified regarding the end of beta phase and onset of commercial service. The pricing of commercial service is not being announced as of now.

The Micro Cloud Foundry is a free download at micro.cloudfoundry.com for developers interested in a single instance, personal PaaS on your local machine.

CloudFoundry.org hosts the community-driven open source Cloud Foundry project led by VMware. The developer community is able to freely download and build the open source Cloud Foundry code.

Cloud Foundry is based upon an open system architecture with the fundamental tenets of friction free development. VMware believes that in the cloud era this maps to flexibility and community participation, i.e. open source. With this fundamental belief, VMware is open sourcing the Cloud Foundry application execution engine, application services interface and cloud provider interface.

The easiest way to start using Cloud Foundry is either through the VMware operated (beta) service at CloudFoundry.com or through downloading and running Micro Cloud Foundry. Registration for Cloud Foundry to use the service or to download Micro Cloud Foundry is free.

One of the core tenets of Cloud Foundry is that it is free from underlying infrastructure. This gives users the choice of using their existing infrastructure (desktop, datacenter and private clouds) and still leverage all the benefits of PaaS.

Micro Cloud Foundry can be downloaded and deployed on your machine using VMware Player, VMware Fusion, or VMware Workstation to run a single instance PaaS environment suitable for quick development and testing cycles.

Additionally, developers may refer to the Cloud Foundry open source project at CloudFoundry.org and find relevant details to download and build their own private platform. This customized platform can be deployed on the infrastructure of your choice.

VMware welcomes developer contributions to the open source Cloud Foundry project. Please visit CloudFoundry.org to familiarize yourself with the project and to get instructions on how to join the community and start contributing.

The Cloud Foundry service previously hosted at CloudFoundry.com allowed developers to quickly deploy Java Spring applications on Amazon Web Services infrastructure. This service is now available at classic.cloudfoundry.com.

The Cloud Foundry initiative announced on April 12th, 2011 is a full featured, open PaaS service that allows customers to build and deploy applications on multiple frameworks and multiple clouds.

• To learn more about our commercial service please visit CloudFoundry.com.
• To learn more about the open source project, please visit CloudFoundry.org.
• To learn more about VMware’s other cloud computing offerings, please visit vmware.com.