Tier 3 Adds .NET to Cloud Foundry
VMware's open source Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service (PaaS) is getting an unlikely addition: support for Microsoft's .NET Framework.
It's not coming from VMware but from cloud provider Tier 3, which announced it is contributing its own fork of the .NET Framework for Cloud Foundry to the open source community. The framework will allow developers to port their .NET applications to Cloud Foundry.
The move comes just one day after Microsoft announced an upgraded release of its PaaS -- the Windows Azure platform -- which among other things includes a preview of its Hadoop connectors, a Node.js software development kit (SDK) and a JavaScript plug-in for Eclipse developers.
Bellevue, Wash.-based Tier 3 will contribute its .NET fork of Cloud Foundry, called Iron Foundry, as well as its Windows version of the Cloud Foundry Explorer and a Visual Studio plug-in for Cloud Foundry. Tier 3 is making the code available at ironfoundry.org and at GitHub under an Apache 2 license.
"Because developers can run their own instances of Iron Foundry in-house or with any service provider who supports it, developers finally have a truly open, interoperable .NET PaaS solution that can be run inside and outside the firewall," said a company blog post. "And because you can run your own instances of Iron Foundry, it's easy to have a full test, QA, and staging environment before pushing to production. In addition, operations teams now have the freedom to choose among various service providers that meet their needs in areas such as security, compliance, availability, location, etc."
In a bid to accelerate adoption of its .NET fork of Cloud Foundry, Tier 3 is offering developers trial usage consisting of one Web and one database instance for 90 days, running on the company's cloud platform.
Cloud Foundry, launched in April, appears to be gaining momentum. It was rated the top cloud PaaS platform by developers, according to the results of a survey by Evans Data Corp. last month. Cloud Foundry is designed to run Spring, Rails, Node.js and Scala applications. With .NET support available on Cloud Foundry, that should only broaden its appeal.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 12/13/2011 at 1:14 PM