For those who have not heard, Cloud Foundry, the open platform-as-a-service project, is now part of the recently announced Pivotal Initiative, an independent entity funded by VMware and EMC. (For a preview of our Paul Maritz-led Pivotal Initiative, check out this Wired article).
Our independent status is quite meaningful and gives us the ability to engage with our large ecosystem in new ways. Adding full-time external committers has always been a goal of the team, and we are engaged with several organizations about putting dedicated resources on the extended engineering team –we believe this to be a very important step forward. The scale of these external investments is significant and a major milestone in our growth. The heart of Cloud Foundry, however, really comes from individual community contributions and users, so of course, we invite you to join us. All you need to do is send a pull-request.
As more and more organizations contribute to Cloud Foundry a transparent roadmap to the community is paramount. In January we began publishing a quarterly plan as part of our community documentation and since then our mailing list activity has hit an all-time high. We will be prolific in communicating the updated roadmap and updates on new work including logging APIs, .NET support, Cloud Foundry BOSH enhancements and more.
Cloud independence and multi-cloud support are important beliefs for us and the broader Pivotal Initiative. Expect open interfaces and support for a variety of clouds, with continued development on AWS, Openstack, vCloud and vSphere environments.
Our own financial and human investment in the project continues to grow. Cloud Foundry is staffed with over forty full time internal engineers, augmented by an additional team of twenty five spread across PM, developer advocacy and community management.
Last week we began actively selling software update and support subscriptions to large customers, another important milestone. Enterprise interest in building large scale internal agile platforms with Cloud Foundry is tremendous and we expect an interesting new backlog of feature requests from these engagements. The only proprietary code in these subscriptions is our web console, so any new enhancements will immediately benefit the larger community.
Finally we have again weighed the best governance model for the project and believe the current corporate sponsored, Apache 2 licensed, pull request driven approach, remains the right one. Adding external committers will also enhance the diversity and strength of the team. That said, the massive growth of the community and ecosystem requires mediating a diverse set of needs and we will always be open to other governance models for the project in the future.
Our mission is to become the most popular platform for new applications and the services used to build them across public and private clouds. If your organization would like to join us in building something great please contact us here.
James Watters, Head of Product
The Cloud Foundry Team
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