A new release management and deployment framework known as BOSH was released Wednesday by VMware, one year after the roll-out of its Platform-as-a-Service Cloud Foundry. In an official blog post marking the event, the Cloud Foundry team said that BOSH should make it easier for end-users of the platform to manage production instances of their apps.
"BOSH automates a variety of cloud infrastructure and allows targeted service updates with consistent results and minimal to no down time," the team wrote.
GitHub documentation indicates that BOSH can be used in conjunction with Amazon Web Services and OpenStack, in addition to VMware's own vSphere product, underlining the company's stated focus on maintaining openness and flexibility.
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Cloud Foundry's staff are apparently unafraid to eat their own dog food - the project's main website is run on BOSH, the blog post noted, which likely allowed for effective operational testing.
In addition to the new release management and updating system, Cloud Foundry also revamped the way it manages source code on the project's one-year anniversary. CloudFoundry.org, the team said, brings new interoperability with frameworks like Gerrit and Jenkins - for reviews and continuous integration, respectively - as well as centralizing the Git repositories used to store the project's source code.
Cloud Foundry's birthday comes a day after VMware announced a new partnership with the Open Networking Research Center, further underlining its commitment to open standards in enterprise IT. The company's sponsorship of research into software-defined networking could also prove highly valuable to its market position, particularly if the new partnership involves it more closely in promising technologies like OpenFlow, which is currently the best-known format for SDN.
Cloud Foundry's open-source nature made it something of a novelty at its release, though other layers of open-source cloud had already been pioneered by projects like OpenStack. Still, the continued prominence of an open product could go a long way toward counteracting the perception - promoted by VMware's rivals, it must be said - that the company's products create the risk of vendor lock-in.
Email Jon Gold at jgold@nww.com and follow him on Twitter at @NWWJonGold.
