Already, in the few short years that cloud has been in the mainstream IT conversation, we’ve seen the rise of “bare metal” cloud (thus ending the illusion of cloud’s infinite capacity to users), the substitution of virtualized machines by Docker containers, and most recently, the potential disruption of containers through the recent CoreOS Rocket announcement and Docker’s alleged movement toward full-fledged PaaS.
Meanwhile, PaaS was supposed to be subsumed into IaaS this year. Oh, and companies who were routinely accused of “cloudwashing” a few years ago are now considered to be mainstream cloud technology providers.
Which brings us to this week’s formal establishment of the Coud Foundry Foundation. Initial reaction seems to be that his organization will be detrimental to non-members Red Hat and Oracle, although it’s clear that Oracle will buy almost anything it seems it needs, and Red Hat is large enough (with $1.5 billion annual revenue) to shore up its weaknesses (say, in containers) as well.