VMware recently announced the acquisition of SpringSource, an open-source Java tools maker, for $400M. Not bad for SpringSoruce which only has $25M in revenues. I've been a big fan of SpringSource and user of their tools for quite a while. Hopefully this turns out to be a good deal for SpringSource and developers using their products. This deal has a couple of interesting features:
- Provides VMware with a single cloud platform with both IaaS and PaaS offerings
- Offers enterprise Java for development in the cloud
A couple of days after this announcement, SpringSource released their road map for their enterprise Java cloud offering, SpringSource Cloud Foundry. Cloud Foundry will allow developers to deploy their Java appplications to the cloud using a simple and configurable web interface. The initial release rides on top of Amazon’s EC2 infrastructure but SpringSource wants to eventually provide both public and private clouds on multiple platforms.
Since this is SpringSource, the programming and deployment model is wholly built on open source technologies. The core runtime is their tc Server product (built on Apache Tomcat), they offer MySQL for a relational database and utilize Apache HTTP web server for load balancing. They also integrate Hyperic technologies for server monitoring and management. Their expectations are that most developers will be deploying Spring or Grails applications but Cloud Foundry is not limited to these technologies.
The cloud environment is fast and nimble so let's see if VMware and SpringSource can keep up. The SpringSource blog has more details on the Foundry notice.
