I am wondering if Cloudfoundry and OpenShift will become success stories (like Amazon Web Services). The idea of an open source application serving platform sounds intriguing, however, the community pages are somewhat deserted and documentation is poor… After downloading the Cloudfoundry source code, it looks more like a prototype. What do you think?
August 3, 2011 at 7:21 pm |
Cloud Foundry is alive and vibrant, expect to see lots in the next month.
As for specifics, realize that it is BETA right now. There have been many pull requests accepted for extending the CloudFoundry.org code base. In addition, many groups are standing up Cloud Foundry to create both Private and Public PaaS solutions. A public example is ActiveState’s Stackato PaaS offering which is based on the Cloud Foundry code base, but extends it to offer Python and Perl on a PaaS.
I hope this helps to give everyone a flavor for things….
August 3, 2011 at 8:28 pm |
I think the concept certainly has a future. However, the race is far from over.
Just released a teaser of what I’ve been working on with a colleague for a little while now here if you want to take a peak.
Details and links and things here:
http://www.productionscale.com/home/2011/8/2/welcome-vgbuilder-to-the-world.html
August 3, 2011 at 9:31 pm |
@Dave: Thank you for the quick response. Don’t get me wrong, I would love these projects becoming a huge success. In fact, I am investigating them as a foundation for research work around management of distributed applications that I have recently started. I want to understand what the roadmap for the projects is and if they are backed with sufficient funding & manpower. Maybe there are community channels that I am not aware of. I have been looking for documents that describe the architecture in more detail without having to scan through the source code…
@Kent Very cool! I just subscribed :)
August 3, 2011 at 9:56 pm |
Thanks Markus. Look forward to your feedback when we open up more slots.
August 5, 2011 at 2:38 am |
Hmmm. Kind of a strange title for a blog post. But I’ll bite. Of course they have a future! Documentation is poor? Check it: http://red.ht/mW1awR or head on over to the docs page on openshift.com, plenty of example guides. (Ok, the PDFs should be be in HTML but we’re working on it.) Plus loads of videos on how to do stuff, not just marketing flim-flam. Maybe the forums aren’t hoppin’ but we are seeing lots of apps being deployed everyday and that’s a good thing. Have you tried OpenShift Express? I wouldn’t call it a prototype at all. Lots of awesomeness has been delivered in the platform since it debuted in May. Jump on #openshift on freenode, we’d be happy to show you how to get started.
August 5, 2011 at 5:12 pm |
Jimmy, thanks for your comment. The title is meant to be provocative because I like the idea of an Open Source Cloud Platform but have been disappointed by the implementation of Cloudfoundry. I haven’t tried OpenShift, yet. The prototype remark therefore refers to Cloudfoundry which is built on a couple of Rails apps. This feels like a strange choice for this sort of middleware platform. Rails is great, but maybe not so great for this particular type of software… I will be very happy to learn more about OpenShift. Do you have architecture diagrams that depict the functions and connections of the components that OpenShift is made up from? That would be tremendously helpful in evaluating it. Another thing: where can I fork the source code?