Today, Pivotal announced the availability of Pivotal CF, along with a set of Pivotal One services.
Pivotal CF is a commercial offering built on the top of the open-source Cloud Foundry cloud platform environment. The environment can be bootstrapped on existing hardware, run on either public or private virtualised machines on infrastructure such as OpenStack, Amazon EC2 or used directly in VMware's vSphere virtual machines. Most applications that can run on Heroku can run on Cloud Foundry with buildpacks, which are compatible between the two platforms. Having the same API for controlling and distributing programs avoids vendor lock-in or tight coupling to a particular platform's APIs.
Cloud Foundry was launched in April 2011 by VMware as an open-source Platform as a Service (PaaS). In April 2012 the BOSH toolchain was released as open source, which allows users and devops to publish and manage applications running on the Cloud Foundry platform across distributed infrastructure. Pivotal grew out of these in April 2013 as a joint venture between VMware and EMC to continue the evolution of the platform, and Cloud Foundry was used by Comic Relief in the UK to provide a scalable solution for donations, and to avoid any single vendor lock-in.
Pivotal CF is built to take advantage of VMware's vSphere virtualisation product, allowing companies who have invested in vSphere to take advantage of the virtualised platform.
In addition to the commercial offering, there are also a set of services available, including Pivotal HD (a natively scalable packaging for Apache Hadoop for the Pivotal platform) and Pivotal AX (an enterprise level analytics and instrumentation package). There are also services based on the open-source message broker RabbitMQ and MySQL.
Pivotal have been developing more of the code for the management of Cloud Foundry as Go applications, including their recently rewritten command line interface which was developed completely in Go. From the blog post:
Meanwhile, Golang has been gaining traction as a language that is designed for highly concurrent applications. Within Cloud Foundry we’ve already got several components that are written in Go: the router, distributed logging system, health manager, and we’re working on more. Because Go is a language we already know, and has the great advantage of being able to create cross-compiled binaries, it seemed like the perfect match!
Pivotal CF aims to provide enterprises with a support model and a set of pre-tested and pre-configured services to roll out a distributed cloud on existing or virtualised hardware.