Category Archives: Cloud Foundry

Cloud Foundry, CloudCredo, M&A, News & Analysis

Pivotal buys UK-based CloudCredo to acquire Cloud Foundry skills

M&ALondon-based Cloud Foundry services provider CloudCredo has been bought by San Francisco-based software vendor Pivotal, a VMware spin off company. The acquisition includes CloudCredo subsidiary stayUp, which specialises in log analysis.

The logic of the acquisition is that it will make it easier for enterprises to use the new Pivotal Cloud Foundry, according to Pivotal CEO Rob Mee.

CloudCredo will continue to operate from London and service its existing customers, but its new brief includes expanding Pivotal Cloud Foundry’s growth across the world. CloudCredo’s expertise will be applied to help enterprise customers understand how to use the Pivotal Cloud Foundry Cloud Native platform more quickly and fine tune their techniques for creating the appropriate software.

Cloud Foundry skills are at a premium, as there is a scant supply of IT experts in Europe with the necessary skills for providing open source platforms as a service (PaaS) according to analyst James Governor, founder of research company RedMonk. “The pool of Cloud Foundry systems talent in Europe is limited and service companies with a proven track record is even rarer,” he said.

CloudCredo has extensive knowledge of running Cloud Foundry for some of the world’s largest brands, according to Pivotal CEO Mee. “With this expertise, we can better help our customers adopt Pivotal’s Cloud Native platform more quickly,“ he said.

Joining Pivotal means that, overnight, CloudCredo can operate at a global scale, said its CEO Colin Humphreys.

Cloud Foundry, connected car, Internet of Things, Mercedes, News & Analysis, Pivotal

Mercedes-Benz and Pivotal forge smart car apps on Cloud Foundry

connected-car-normalUsing your mobile phone while driving could become compulsory, thanks to a new connected car application being jointly developed by Mercedes-Benz and Pivotal.

The Mercedes me app will give drivers real-time information about the status of their cars through their smartphones and smart watches.

Pivotal and Mercedes-Benz are working on the app on Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry and Spring in a bid to give Mercedes drivers information about their car’s vital signs (such as oil, water and petrol levels) and remote control of everything from heating and locks to navigation. The system will work with a navigation tool via iPhone and Apple Watch.

According to Mercedes-Benz by 2020 all vehicles will be emission-free and will feature autonomous driving and deep levels of Internet connectivity. To support these initiatives, it is using Pivotal Labs’ cloud native platform, Pivotal Cloud Foundry with the developer framework Spring Boot.

With Daimler and Mercedes-Benz both anxious to meet emissions targets, their developers were keen to explore all the possibilities of Pivotal’s modern agile software development methods, said Scott Yara, Co-President at Pivotal. “They are now also a great software company,” said Yara.

Daimler’s work with Pivotal’s cloud platform minimized its innovation cycle by helping it develop a system faster than ever, according to Christoph Hartung, Head of Connected Cars at Mercedes-Benz. “Our collaboration with Pivotal will define a new digital driving culture with state of the art information technologies, online communication systems and automotive services,” said Hartnung.

Bill Hilf, Cloud Foundry, Docker, Helion, HP, Linux containers, News & Analysis, OpenStack, Stackato, Xavier Poisson

HP to buy Stackato to boost hybrid cloud strategy

HP is buying Stackato to boost support for Linux containers

HP is buying Stackato to boost support for Linux containers

HP is to acquire ActiveState’s Stackato business for an undisclosed sum, which the company said would give a boost to its hybrid cloud strategy.

Like HP Helion Development Platform, Stackato’s platform as a service is built on Cloud Foundry and offers robust support for Docker, which is gaining the lion’s share of attention in the Linux container world. It offers deployments on a range of cloud infrastructure including AWS, VMware, OpenStack, HP Cloud and KVM.

HP said the move would strengthen its hybrid cloud strategy, which largely puts application catalogues, workload automation, Cloud Foundry and OpenStack front and centre.

“The Stackato PaaS solution strengthens the HP Helion portfolio and reinforces HP’s commitment to delivering customers open source solutions that help accelerate their transition to hybrid clouds,” said Bill Hilf, Senior Vice President, product and service management, HP Cloud. “The acquisition reinforces HP’s focus on driving Cloud Foundry as the open standard cloud native application platform.”

After the acquisition closes, which is expected to occur sometime in Q4 this year, HP will integrate Stackato into the Helion Development Platform.

The strong support for Linux containers will help HP build on its hybrid cloud strategy. Containers are useful in part because they are extremely portable and can run on pretty much any infrastructure, a useful feature when it comes to lifting and shifting workloads and application components in heterogeneous infrastructure environments. In an interview with BCN earlier this month Xavier Poisson, vice president of HP Helion in EMEA said Linux containers are increasingly at the core of cloud-native app development – so anything that can boost the company’s support of containers could make it more competitive.

Azure, Cloud Foundry, Microsoft, News & Analysis, PaaS, Platform as a service

Cloud Foundry heads to Azure

Microsoft has announced a public preview of Cloud Foundry running on Azure

Microsoft has announced a public preview of Cloud Foundry running on Azure

Microsoft has announced a long awaited public preview of Cloud Foundry for Azure which the company said will help enable its customers with multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments.

Microsoft has been talking about adding Cloud Foundry support to Azure for the better part of a year, and earlier this month the company drew one step closer to a beta release by demoing a Cloud Foundry deployment on its public cloud service.

In a blog post explaining the move Ning Kuang, senior program manager for Microsoft Azure said Cloud Foundry can be deployed quickly using an Azure Resource Manager template, or the through open source workload lifecycle manager BOSH.

“Hybrid and Multi-cloud support is one of the key strengths of Cloud Foundry and the Azure [Cloud Provider Interface] enables you to extend your private data to Azure for running Cloud Foundry based applications. In addition, we are working to ensure that Azure CPI will in work in a private cloud environment running on Azure Stack and we will have more on that to come in the near future,” Kuang explained.

“We’re hoping to release the public Beta in a few weeks and will then upstream the code back to the community source tree in a few months prior to GA,” she added.

Cloud Foundry is one of the most popular PaaSs around today so the move to support it may help on-board more devops-types to Microsoft Azure, which is currently one of the fastest growing infrastructure as a service platforms around (at least in terms of revenue).

Cloud Foundry, Dell, News & Analysis, Open Source, PaaS, Pivotal

Dell partners with Pivotal on Cloud Foundry

Dell Services will resell Pivotal CF and advise customers on implementation, app development and migration to different cloud platforms

Dell Services will resell Pivotal CF and advise customers on implementation, app development and migration to different cloud platforms

Dell Services announced a partnership with Pivotal this week that will see the company include Pivotal CF in its digital services portfolio.

The deal will see Dell Services resell Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry distribution as well as advise clients on application development, integration and multi-cloud migration using both Pivotal’s and open source Cloud Foundry.

The companies said the move will help customers enable a DevOps culture within their organisations and speed up application deployment.

“Digital transformation is driving enterprises to develop and deploy applications in an agile manner thereby creating the need for a new generation of application platforms,” Raman Sapra, executive director and global head, Dell Digital Business Services.

“Our collaboration with Pivotal expands our digital services portfolio to include development of next-generation, enterprise-class solutions using a leading platform like Pivotal Cloud Foundry to help customers unlock the power of innovation and fast track their digital transformation journey,” Sapra said.

Scott Aronson, senior vice president, worldwide field operations at Pivotal said: “Pivotal Cloud Foundry is emerging as a fundamental enabler of digital transformation as companies are under increased pressure to leverage software to differentiate their business models. Our partnership with Dell Services, a leading and trusted global services provider, will help our customers accelerate their digital transformation journey.”

Boris Renski, Cloud Foundry, IaaS, James Watters, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack, PaaS

Mirantis, Pivotal team up on OpenStack, Cloud Foundry integration

Mirantis and Pivotal are working to integrate their commercial deployments of OpenStack and Cloud Foundry, respectively

Mirantis and Pivotal are working to integrate their commercial deployments of OpenStack and Cloud Foundry, respectively

Pivotal and Mirantis announced this week that the two companies are teaming up to accelerate integration of Cloud Foundry and OpenStack.

As part of the move Pivotal will support Pivotal CF, the company’s commercial distribution of the open source platform-as-a-service, on Mirantis’ distribution of OpenStack.

“Our joint customers are seeking open, bleeding-edge technologies to accelerate their software development and bring new products to market faster,” said James Watters, vice president and general manager of the Cloud Platform Group at Pivotal.

“Now, with Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Mirantis OpenStack, enterprises across various industries can rapidly deliver cloud-native, scalable applications to their customers with minimal risk and maximum ROI,” Watters said.

The move comes just one month after Mirantis announced it would join the Cloud Foundry Foundation in a bid to help drive integration between the two open source platforms. At the time, Alex Freedland, Mirantis co-founder and chairman said an essential part of rolling out software to help organisations build their own clouds includes making it as easy as possible to deploy and manage technologies “higher up the stack” like Cloud Foundry.

“Enterprises everywhere are adopting a new generation of tools, processes and platforms to help them compete more effectively,” said Boris Renski, Mirantis chief marketing officer and co-founder. “Mirantis and Pivotal have made Pivotal Cloud Foundry deployable on Mirantis OpenStack at the click of a button, powering continuous innovation.”

Joint customers can install Pivotal Cloud Foundry onto Mirantis OpenStack using the companies’ deployment guide, but the two companies are working towards adding a full Pivotal CF installation into the application catalogue of the next OpenStack release, Murano.

Alex Freedland, Cloud Foundry, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack, Platform as a service, Sam Ramji

Mirantis joins Cloud Foundry to improve OpenStack PaaS integration

Mirantis has joined Cloud Foundry in a move aimed at improving integration between Cloud Foundry and OpenStack

Mirantis has joined Cloud Foundry in a move aimed at improving integration between Cloud Foundry and OpenStack

Pure-play OpenStack vendor Mirantis is joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation in a bid to help drive integration between the two open source platforms.

OpenStack has gained strong momentum in recent years with vendors like HP and IBM building fully fledged portfolios based on the technology; according to 451 Research OpenStack revenue will hit $3.3bn by 2018.

And as far as open source platform-as-a-service projects go, Cloud Foundry seems to have gained the lion’s share of vendor buy-in.

“As the pure-play OpenStack company, Mirantis is focused on making OpenStack the best way to build a private cloud and enable software development,” said Alex Freedland, Mirantis co-founder and chairman.

“Part of that vision is making it as simple as possible to deploy and manage technologies higher ‘up the stack’ – like Cloud Foundry, which has become a very popular PaaS for developer productivity on top of OpenStack. We believe that OpenStack serves the market best by supporting the most popular PaaS solutions and giving enterprise customers maximum choice, rather than prescribing a specific PaaS.”

Sam Ramji, chief executive officer of Cloud Foundry said: “Mirantis and the OpenStack community are doing important work at the infrastructure level of the stack. We’re looking forward to their contributions to optimise OpenStack and Cloud Foundry and empower developers to build their applications for the cloud – quickly and easily.”

In October last year Mirantis secured $100m in series B investment, which has no doubt put the company in a strong position to double down on industry partnerships.

Cloud Foundry, E-Commerce, e-retail, Enterprise IT, News & Analysis, OpenShift, PaaS

LeShop taps OpenShift for hybrid cloud app development and management

LeShop has deployed OpenShift to support the company's hybrid cloud strategy

LeShop has deployed OpenShift to support the company’s hybrid cloud strategy

LeShop.ch, one of Switzerland’s largest online supermarkets has selected Red Hat’s commercial OpenShift distribution in a bid to improve how it develops and deploys applications in the cloud.

The company, which uses a combination of its own datacentres and the public cloud to host its applications and consumer-facing websites, was looking to deploy a platform-as-a-service because it wanted increase the performance of its apps and ease their management in a hybrid environment.

Last year the e-retailer migrated its applications to a tightly linked micro-services oriented architecture in order to make its online platforms more scalable, and said it selected OpenShift after considering a number of options including Cloud Foundry and Docker-based platforms.

“It’s not going to be a problem to complete the project on time and on budget,” said Raphaël Anthamatten, head of infrastructure and operations at LeShop.ch. “OpenShift Enterprise provides all of the functions we need to implement the highly flexible micro-services architecture in development and operation.”

Ashesh Badani, vice president and general manager, OpenShift at Red Hat said: “Quickly and reliably launching innovative solutions to market, while leveraging new technologies and application architectures, is one of the key challenges for any online retailer. With OpenShift Enterprise, we support LeShop.ch in developing innovative new services for their online customers in order to become an even more prominent leader in the Swiss market.”