Category Archives: tech

Cloud Foundry trademark and competitive services

This afternoon on Twitter, I saw an interesting interchange between @mchmarny and @samj

from @mchmarny:

VMware’s Cloud Foundry is to PaaS what OpenStack is to IaaS

and in reply from @samj:

@scottsanchez @mchmarny: a nit — you don’t see “rackspace @openstack“, nor should you see “vmware @cloudfoundry“.

But that got me thinking along the lines of my earlier post about cloudfoundry.com compared to cloudfoundry.org.

The trademark for “Cloud Foundry” belongs to VMware, and their legal page states:

Cloud Foundry, VMware, the VMware “boxes” logo and design are registered trademarks or trademarks (the “Marks”) of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions.  You are not permitted to use the Marks without the prior written consent of VMware.

I’m not a lawyer, but to me that pretty clearly states that you couldn’t fire up a competitive service to cloudfoundry.com using the cloudfoundry.org software, and mention “Cloud Foundry” on your service. This compares to comprehensive OpenStack’s trademark policy, which has a significant section on “Permitted uses”, including one part:

If you may use the OpenStack Word Mark to describe that your solution is built on or with the OpenStack technology formally released on the www.openstack.org website (using genuine OpenStack code base), you must state that your product is “Built With the OpenStack™ technology.”

While there’s plenty of time for VMware to make cloudfoundry.org the PaaS layer to OpenStack’s IaaS layer, there’s also plenty of work for VMware to do before that initial statement is true.

 

VMware Cloud Foundry – were VMware’s partners simply too slow?

VMware’s launch of Cloud Foundry has put them in direct competition with some of their service provider partners, just weeks after attempting to reassure them that VMware was not a service provider.

Cloudfoundry.com, a complete hosted PaaS environment managed by VMware directly, in a similar vein to Google App Engine, Heroku, and others. Just weeks ago, when VMware took over the running of Mozy from their parent company EMC, VMware were giving out the message “VMware are not a service provider and not competing with our service provider partners”, but with cloudfoundry.com, the level of competition is pretty clear.

In the backend software powering the service, branded as cloudfoundry.org, “The open platform as a service project”, VMware have made a powerful move packaging various open-source technologies into a ready to build platform that lets service providers build their own PaaS offerings, pretty much the area that VMware already worked – providing the tools to let others build the finished offering to customers. Packaging open source products has proven to be a very effective business model for Red Hat, amongst others, so this isn’t a case of “giving up” on selling software by VMware.

While I’m sure VMware don’t want to upset their service provider partners, cloudfoundry.com is obviously going to put a few noses out of joint, which makes me ask, why VMware went down this route.

The only answer I’ve come up with so far is that their existing partners were simply too slow and didn’t have the same level of commitment to VMware’s vision of the cloud. When VMware launched vCloud Express, I’m sure they were hoping for rapid adoption across a huge range of service providers, but it simply didn’t happen. While there are vCloud providers, you’re unlikely to stumble upon one when you’re looking for hosting.

With cloudfoundry.com, VMware ensuring that there will be a least one committed provider of their platform, but will it encourage other service providers to join in, or will they continue to hold back, struggling to decide between VMware’s offerings and building their own stack on alternatives like Xen Cloud Platform, and Openstack?

Try CloudFoundry on an AWS Micro instance

Update: Unfortunately the snapshot behind this AMI was affected by the AWS data deletion bug recently, so is no longer available. VMware haven’t yet released their own official AMI, but Rightscale’s build is excellent.

There’s lots of excitement and interest around VMware’s new open source platform as a service (PaaS) offering, but at the moment the only way to try it is either to sign up to the cloudfoundry.com service and wait for an invite, or use an image the RightScale have developed for AWS.

However, there’s no real reason the image had to be used via RightScale, so I’ve created an AWS Micro image based on the regular AWS Ubuntu 10.04 image, and following the instructions from github.

It took around 3 hours to do the full build, all the compiles, etc, so I figured it was worth making the AMI image available to everyone, so other people don’t have to do the same thing. I’ve added a 512MB swap file, as the management tools need more memory than a normal Micro image can cope with, but other than that it’s pretty much the stock image.

You can launch the public AMI instance now, from the “eu-west-1” region with the public AMI ID “ami-17dee963”. You can’t launch it from the other regions, sorry. It’ll launch as a Micro image, so it could even be free if it’s your first AWS instance.

The various build tests all pass, but sometimes it is a little slow to run (due to the lack of memory).

Login as “ubuntu”, then run:

cd ~/cloudfoundry/vcap
bin/vcap start
bin/vcap tail

And you should see everything working. If you need to do any debugging, the place to start is the github CloudFoundry VCAP section.

This image is provided as a test version, please don’t rely on it for anything, and I’ll remove the AMI image when the VMware guys launch their own CloudFoundry “Micro” package in a few weeks.

Update: Unfortunately the snapshot behind this AMI was affected by the AWS data deletion bug recently, so is no longer available. VMware haven’t yet released their own official AMI, but Rightscale’s build is excellent.