Cloud Foundry, a VMware-led project, is the world's first open Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. Cloud Foundry provides a platform for building, deploying, and running cloud apps using Spring for Java developers, Rails and Sinatra for Ruby developers, Node.js and other JVM frameworks including Grails.

Close to the announcements on Java EE 7 pledging all the support for Cloud in the forthcoming update to the Enterprise Edition, we also started seeing more Java EE PaaS options like vFabric are showing up in the market, giving a major path for enterprise Java Community  to move to the Cloud.

Cloud Foundary  is positioned as a Development & Testing platform, where by Cloud Foundry allows developers to focus on applications, not machines or middleware. Traditional application deployments require developers to configure and patch systems, maintain middleware and worry about network topologies. Cloud Foundry allows you to focus on your application, not infrastructure, and deploy and scale applications in seconds.

However, as typical  of any  new offering  there  will be comparisons with the equivalent PaaS Offering on .NET  Windows Azure, and  some of the following points have been raised  as a shortcomings of Windows Azure when compared to  Cloud Foundary.  While not really getting into  the marketing angles of the  individual vendors, this article tries to analyze the  so-called shortcomings of Windows Azure and analyze them against the reality from a developer platform perspective.

Myth: Azure Is a Hosting Platform and Not for Development
It is true that Cloud Foundary  targets development  projects, especially Micro Cloud is a single developer instance of Cloud Foundry. It provides developers with a personal PaaS that runs on their desktop. Micro Cloud is provided as a downloadable software image for VMware Fusion or VMware Player, as well a hosted image on selected cloud partners.

Reality with Windows Azure: Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio extend Visual Studio 2010 to enable the creation, configuration, building, debugging, running, packaging and deployment of scalable web applications and services on Windows Azure.

Windows Azure SDK and Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio is  all  you'll need when developing web apps and services for the Azure platform.

The above factors make Windows Azure  development to happen on desktops and deploy to the Cloud.

Also Windows Support multiple deployment configuration options to Staging and Production instance, so that pure development efforts  can concentrate more on the staging environment.

The above points make it clear that  Windows Azure  is  also serve as a robust  Development and Testing  platform.

Myth: Azure Platform Is Restrictive
Cloud Foundry supports Spring for Java applications, Rails and Sinatra for Ruby apps, Node.js apps and apps for other JVM frameworks including Grails. Cloud Foundry today supports the MongoDB, MySQL. It is good to see  Cloud Foundary supports  a wide variety of Language and framework of choice.   However  considering  large scale enterprise adoption it is  mostly Java Variants that   is going to have a major stake in the  Cloud Foundry as of today.

Reality with Windows Azure: Windows Azure supports popular standards, protocols and languages including SOAP, REST, XML, Java, PHP and Ruby. In addition, the underlying .net platform itself supports multiple languages like  VB.net, C#, C++  and TSQL as part of Sql Azure.

Developers have the choice of several languages for building their applications, including:

• .NET (C# and Visual Basic), C++
• PHP, Ruby, Python
• Java,

These factors point that  Windows Azure is not restrictive from  developer point of view.

Myth: Windows Azure Is Only for Microsoft Public Cloud
One of the advantages of  Cloud Foundry is that it is free from underlying infrastructure. This gives users a choice to use their existing infrastructure (desktop, datacenter and private clouds) and still leverage all the benefits of PaaS. This customized platform can be deployed behind in private cloud or infrastructure of your choice.

Reality with Windows Azure: While Windows Azure platform provides a very good public platform for hosting applications, we have other choices too.

Windows Azure platform appliance is a turnkey cloud platform that customers can deploy in their own datacenter, across hundreds to thousands of servers. The Windows Azure platform appliance consists of Windows Azure, SQL Azure and a Microsoft-specified configuration of network, storage and server hardware. This hardware will be delivered by a variety of partners.

Also even though a distinct possibility, Windows Azure platform is built on the  core .NET platform and hence Windows Azure applications, can run on Amazon EC2  instances running Windows  Server 2008.

Summary
Cloud Foundry is a welcome sign, as  it is one  more  choice for PaaS for the developers. However, in the current context some feel that  it will be a  game changer in the Platform market and especially as a replacement  for Windows Azure.  However we find that  Windows Azure is robust enough to take care the enterprise needs  and Cloud Foundry will compliment the  enterprise cloud needs of Java EE shops.

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