The movement toward cloud independence receives a major boost with today’s announcement that Pivotal will be collaborating with IBM on Cloud Foundry development. In a joint announcement, the two companies emphasized their commitment to interoperability, presenting a plan for an open community model for the project.
The Cloud Foundry model — an open platform as a service (PaaS) with wide industry adoption and support — forgoes vendor lock-in. This open platform allows developers to rapidly build and deploy applications on their choice of cloud services. IBM’s adoption of Cloud Foundry within the company’s open cloud architecture, and commitment to active development with Pivotal, users, and vendors is a major vote of support for the Cloud Foundry vision.
To kick off this new era for cloud independence, Pivotal and IBM announced Platform, the Cloud Foundry Conference, taking place September 8–9 in Santa Clara, CA. The community conference will highlight Cloud Foundry’s open community model and the platform’s advantages. Featuring presentations by key contributors to the project, Platform, the Cloud Foundry Conference will also include sessions by expert Cloud Foundry developers and companies already leveraging the benefits of the open PaaS.
The ongoing collaboration with IBM will yield numerous advantages for existing users and the larger developer community. An early example of this is the announcement of a preview version of IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty Core running on the Cloud Foundry platform. This lightweight version of the WebSphere Application Server enables the rapid development and deployment of applications using simplified frameworks that require fewer resources.
These efforts, with more collaborations to come, emphasize Pivotal and IBM’s shared commitment to supporting open standards and building ecosystems that ease development and spur rapid innovation.
