NTT, the world’s leading telecom, has been active in fostering the Cloud Foundry developer and user community in Japan. We’re excited about NTT Lab’s latest open source community contribution to Cloud Foundry – Nise BOSH, a lightweight BOSH emulator for locally compiling, releasing and testing services. BOSH is an open source tool chain for release engineering, deployment and lifecycle management of large-scale distributed applications and services, such as Cloud Foundry. Nise BOSH allows developers and cloud operators who use BOSH to speed up the development feedback cycle while saving effort and money. In this post, we’ll explain how all this works and why it’s useful.

Normal BOSH Deploy Cycle

When you do a bosh deploy of a large scale distributed service such as Cloud Foundry to a cluster, BOSH does a number of things on your behalf:

1. Prepares deployment
2. Compiles packages – Calculates all packages and their dependencies that need to be compiled. It then begins compiling the packages and storing their output in the blobstore. The number of workers specified in the deployment configuration determines how many VMs can be created at once for compiling.
3. Prepares DNS
4. Creates bound missing VMs – Creates new VMs, deletes extra VMs.
5. Binds instance VMs
6. Prepares configuration
7. Updates/deletes jobs – Deletes unneeded instances, creates needed instances, updates existing instances if they are not already updated. This is the step where things get pushed live.

In step #2 BOSH spins up a number of worker VMs to compile your code packages, then installs your compiled code in one or more VMs called stemcells. Normally all of these VMs are running somewhere on an IaaS provider such as VMware vSphere or AWS EC2.

Using Nise BOSH to Speed Up the Feedback Cycle

This is great in production, but when iterating on a BOSH Package, spinning up multiple VMs for compilation and deployment makes for a slow feedback cycle and a lot of ssh’ing into servers. It can also be costly, as you may have to pay for development resources on an IaaS, e.g. on AWS. Nise BOSH is a great help when developing a BOSH package. A Package is a collection of source code along with a script that contains instruction how to compile it to binary format and install it, with optional dependencies on other pre-requisite packages. Without Internet access or an IaaS, Nise BOSH will compile the packages necessary to run the job and install them on the box that you’re on, saving you the time, expense and complexity of using remote resources on AWS or another IaaS. Let’s see how this works.

First, start on a machine that looks like your target Stemcell. A Stemcell is a VM template with an embedded BOSH Agent. The Stemcell used for Cloud Foundry is a standard Ubuntu distribution. For this you can use Vagrant, a handy tool to create easily reproducible environments on your local laptop. Install Vagrant and then in a terminal:

$ vagrant init lucid64 http://files.vagrantup.com/lucid64.box 
$ vagrant up
$ vagrant ssh

You should now be in an Ubuntu lucid64 environment on your local machine. Now install Nise BOSH –

$git clone git@github.com:nttlabs/nise_bosh.git
$cd nise_bosh
$bundle install

Next you need to get a BOSH Cloud Foundry release – a BOSH release is a collection of source code, configuration files and startup scripts used to run services, along with a version number that uniquely identifies the components.

$git clone git@github.com:cloudfoundry/cf-release.git 
$cd cf-release 
$git submodule sync 
$git submodule update --init --recursive

You can now modify the Cloud Foundry open source code in cf-release/src as your project needs require. Once you are ready to test your changes, you need to create the release, but first install the BOSH CLI -

$gem install bosh_cli 
$bosh create release

Before you can deploy your release you’ll need a BOSH manifest file we’ll call deploy.conf. An example of the contents for a Nise BOSH manifest can be found in the Nise BOSH doc.

Now run Nise BOSH from the nise_bosh directory to launch dea_next. Without Internet access or an IaaS, Nise BOSH will compile the packages necessary to run the job and install them on the box that you’re on. Then just run run-job start to start the jobs in /var/vcap/bosh/etc/monitrc locally on your box.

$sudo PATH=$PATH bundle exec ./bin/nise-bosh ~/cf-release ~/deploy.conf dea_next
$./bin/run-job start

Nise BOSH is all set up to help you play with dea_next all by itself, but eventually it might enable to you develop and run Cloud Foundry right on your local machine. We see the many community contributions like NTT Nise BOSH as proof of the power of an Open PaaS ecosystem to advance the project. Next time you’re working on a BOSH release, give it a try.

–Matthew Kocher and Vikram Rana, Cloud Foundry Team

From its beginning, Cloud Foundry has been committed to providing developers and enterprises choice of deployment options spanning public and private clouds. In this post, Jonas Partner, CEO of CloudCredo and OpenCredo, shares how their enterprise customers are using PaaS to deploy applications that span public and private clouds to increase availability, add extra capacity and prevent lock-in.

As one of the co-founders of OpenCredo I have been actively working with Cloud Foundry since its early days. We were one of the first companies to launch a production application on Cloud Foundry with the help of our friends at Carrenza. More recently we have established CloudCredo to help both enterprise customers wishing to host Cloud Foundry on their own infrastructure and cloud service providers wishing to offer Platform as a Service. We helped Ospero to bring a Cloud Foundry-based PaaS running on vCloud Director to market to better serve their customers.

With the growing availability of public Cloud Foundry instances, we are seeing an increase in interest from enterprise customers in hybrid cloud as a way to extract maximum value from their existing infrastructure while enabling capacity on demand through expansion into public cloud. In this blog we will discuss why hybrid PaaS with Cloud Foundry is gaining interest, some of the ways people are using it today and how we hope to be using it in the future.

Why Cloud Foundry for Hybrid PaaS

The availability of a PaaS that seamlessly spans in-house data centers and various public cloud offerings makes hybrid cloud a compelling commercial proposition. For example, it serves to drive competition among public cloud providers. Extra capacity can be bought from the most cost competitive provider, or spread across a number of providers, as determined by the best commercial fit for the need. To date the majority of public PaaS offerings have been closed source and can’t be run within the enterprise data center. Combine this form of lock-in with some well-publicized outages and most large enterprises simply aren’t willing to consider betting everything on a single instance cloud provider. We see the open, extensible nature of Cloud Foundry and the increasing number of companies offering hosted Cloud Foundry instances as key to making enterprises comfortable with PaaS.

For us the number of companies offering or intending to offer a Cloud Foundry instance is reaching a critical mass, giving enterprises a competitive set of choices of where to run their applications. The Cloud Foundry Core initiative also means that customers can rely on public Cloud Foundry Core compatible instances to meet certain minimum requirements. Taken alongside improved support for running Cloud Foundry on public IaaS such as EC2, enterprises now have three real options for deploying cloud applications: 1) on a Cloud Foundry instance running in house on existing infrastructure, 2) on a Cloud Foundry instance running on large scale public IaaS such as EC2 or 3) on one of the increasing number of cloud providers offering Cloud Foundry as a service.

Being able to pick a company offering a PaaS hosted within national boundaries is already broadening the applicability of PaaS to regulated industries that have requirements on data sovereignty and how data is managed. There are still many other considerations around technology stacks and non-functional requirements that determine whether Cloud Foundry is suitable for a particular workload.

Simple Hybrid Cloud Use Cases

We are seeing significant interest in hybrid PaaS as a way of adding capacity in peak periods and increasing availability. Currently this only works out of the box for simpler cases where 1) there is no need to massively scale the persistence technology and 2) the application’s database does not need to be shared between services on either side of the public private cloud divide. Where enterprises employ SOA it can also be challenging to find a subset of the services that can be moved out to the public cloud. While services can span public and private cloud, this adds complexity, potential performance challenges and cost where data stored in the public cloud is separately billable.

The factors that determine the simplicity of an application for the purposes of a hybrid cloud scenario are primarily how coupled it is to the rest of the enterprise. This coupling can take the form of persisted data, messaging and application services. The simplest case is an application that has none of these forms of dependencies – with the increasing adoption of SOA it is increasingly rare to find these types of applications. When considering the potential use of hybrid cloud, the cost benefit versus the complexity due to connectedness to the rest of the enterprise will be one of the key trade-offs.

Unless for some reason you have a large number of island-like applications then batch processing applications can often provide a fertile ground in the early days of adopting a hybrid cloud deployment strategy. Batch applications often combine minimum data connectivity to the rest of the application, often running on a data snapshot, with providing cost benefit from scaling up just for the batch run.

Scalable Database Services

The open source Cloud Foundry project provides a number of open data technologies that can be configured to “scale up” as single instance services out of the box. We see incorporation of scale-out, multi-instance database services as key to widening the use cases that can be addressed by Cloud Foundry and are currently working to address this opportunity for our customers.

At CloudCredo we recently open sourced a simple Cassandra service integration for Cloud Foundry on GitHub. The initial implementation was targeted mainly at development and test usage since it was single instance and therefore didn’t provide any way to make the database scale out or highly available. We are now extending that out to a multi-node cluster and we intend that other services such as MongoDB will also follow.

Scalable Databases as a Service can be plugged in to Cloud Foundry very easily by leveraging the Service Broker. This pattern allows the cluster to be managed from outside of Cloud Foundry but for the ‘external’ cluster service to be exposed to clients as a running Cloud Foundry service. The benefits of this model include Cloud Foundry features such as central configuration management and automatic service binding from applications.

While horizontal scaling and clustering of open database services opens up new potential, what really excites us is the potential to use the multi-data center capabilities of persistence technologies in conjunction with hybrid PaaS. Cassandra and other open data technologies such as Riak make it possible to have a logical database which spans multiple data centers and therefore potentially both public and private cloud.

A PaaS which integrates multi-data center databases that are easy to deploy and provide data synchronization would make solving problems such as disaster recovery and transparent scaling of both database and application code much easier. Disaster recovery currently relies on expensive low latency RPO systems that require manual, offsite back-ups be taken to mirror production. A multi-node, multi-data center data service would have the potential to automatically mirror data across data centers as part of the online transaction processing of the application. Having effectively the same database available within both public and private PaaS would also simplify the process of scaling out.

Conclusion

The growing popularity and increasing number of ways to consume Cloud Foundry is making hybrid PaaS an appealing reality for many enterprises. Cloud Foundry provides the Service Broker to facilitate integration of new, clustered open data technologies and legacy clustered databases, easing enterprise adoption in cases where the database services that come as part of the platform are not sufficient. The combination of reliable open source technologies that can deal with databases and the increasing availability of Cloud Foundry is an exciting option for those trying to use PaaS within the enterprise. Being able to solve these sorts of traditionally expensive problems with a PaaS will make PaaS even more compelling for large enterprises.

About the Author: Jonas Partner is CEO of OpenCredo, a software consultancy and delivery firm with offices in the United Kingdom and North America. Recently, Jonas co-founded CloudCredo, a company focused on helping businesses get Cloud Foundry up and running on the infrastructure of their choice. Before establishing OpenCredo in 2009, Jonas was a consultant with Spring Source where he contributed to the Spring Integration project. Jonas maintains interests in Machine Learning and the scalability of highly concurrent enterprise systems.

A fast growing mobile apps market alongside the increasing need for a unified enterprise private cloud platform requires a new generation of open PaaS solutions in China.

In this guest blog, Wei-Min Lu, founder and CEO of Anchora, explains why Anchora selected Cloud Foundry as the basis for its MoPaaS platform and why it chose to join Cloud Foundry Core.

Today we are excited to join Cloud Foundry Core as proof of our commitment to cloud application portability across a choice of public and private clouds. Here in China, there is growing demand for an open PaaS that enables developers to build mobile applications and enterprises to build private or dedicated clouds. We built MoPaaS, a cloud application engine based on the Cloud Foundry service platform. Cloud Foundry gives us the flexibility to offer both a public cloud platform with extensions for mobile and data applications and a private/dedicated PaaS solution that integrates with enterprises’ existing infrastructure. We also provide services within Cloud Foundry applications allowing enterprises to take advantage of big data infrastructure for use cases like cloud storage and synchronization, analytics and search.

The Need for Open PaaS in China

It is projected that PaaS will grow at 30% annually over the next few years. Higher growth is expected to occur in China due to 1) a rapidly expanding mobile application market requiring an agile back-end services platform and 2) the need for cloud application portability and the rise of applications taking advantage of big data infrastructure in the enterprise.

China is now the world’s biggest smart phone market with 390 million units projected to be sold this year – more than 1/3 of smart phones to be sold globally in 2013. Businesses of all sizes are looking to take advantage of this trend, increasing the number of mobile apps by 35% annually. There is a growing need for an agile platform with additional services required for mobile applications, such as push notification, geospatial data storage and short message services. Due to the limited resources on the client device, mobile applications require a platform that is able to process large quantities of data in the cloud. A new generation of Open PaaS is needed to handle additional mobile-specific requirements.

With more than 70% of companies implementing PaaS over the next two years, we see emerging needs for PaaS solutions in the China enterprise IT market to consolidate existing applications and infrastructure while building an ecosystem of new enterprise applications in a consistent and unified manner. Enterprise application portability is increasingly becoming a critical need – businesses expect to be able to move their applications for optimal service, regulatory compliance, and data privacy requirements. As enterprises are realizing the impact and starting to build apps to take advantage of big data, there is an urgent need for more sophisticated platform services with big data infrastructure. This includes scalable services for log analysis, cloud storage and synchronization, information clustering, analytics, and customized search.

Building a Public PaaS Using Cloud Foundry

We built MoPaaS to serve developers’ needs to create applications and services without worrying about backend IT tasks. It helps them simplify and automate application lifecycle management, including development, deployment, and operation, significantly reducing IT infrastructure expenditures and devops costs and time. MoPaaS is built on an intelligent cloud service platform infrastructure that consists of two integrated parts:

• Service platform: extends the Cloud Foundry service platform to provide better support for mobile applications, platform monitoring and management, and service extensibility.
• Data platform: based on innovative information chain management (ICM) technology. It offers a simple interface for developers to support data driven applications.

Fig 1. MoPaaS Cloud Application Engine Architecture

MoPaaS provides necessary devops automation, masks complexities from developers and enhances usability by offering additional functions:

• UI: providing ease of use for developers of various levels and a CLI providing more flexibility and control for experienced developers. Developers can use the MoPaaS UI for devops tasks like application deployment and performing resource allocation.
• MDSS (mass data storage service): a high performance distributed storage system that provides cloud storage for user data and application source code management.
• Application monitoring and management: a streamlined visual tool and web console for monitoring and managing applications, services, and environment variables.
• MoPaaS Services: Mobile specific services, such as notifications, short messages, and locations etc. Data services, such as scalable services for log analysis, cloud storage and synchronization, information clustering, and customized search.

Building an Enterprise PaaS Solution Using Cloud Foundry

MoPaaS also provides an intelligent IaaS-PaaS solution for enterprises and service providers to build dedicated clouds to boost service agility, reduce IT expenditures and devops costs while increasing the portability, scalability and reliability of enterprise applications. This solution offers necessary granular controls and customer configuration flexibility provided by IaaS and the devops automation and ease of app creation provided by PaaS. The MoPaas architecture strictly separates PaaS from IaaS services.

Fig 2. MoPaaS Intelligent Cloud Platform

In addition to the services offered by Cloud Foundry, MoPaaS offers a comprehensive array of data services as native Cloud Foundry services and integrates various legacy services.

Fig 3. MoPaaS Services

MoPaaS effectively addresses a wide range of the enterprise cloud platform requirements, including:

• Application consolidation: there is a need for building and running an ecosystem of enterprise applications on a cloud-based platform in a consistent and unified manner. However, many of the applications in enterprises have been around for quite some time and were not designed for the cloud. Among the key requirements, legacy services used by those applications need to be integrated into the cloud platform or upgraded to new services of the cloud platform. MoPaaS addresses the application consolidation and migration issues effectively, as the MoPaaS platform not only supports basic services, but also adds new data services to meet enterprise big data requirements using Cloud Foundry service gateway and seamlessly integrates legacy services used by existing applications, such as Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server, and IBM DB2 using Cloud Foundry service broker (Figure 3).

• Data platform: Big data has increasingly become top of mind across organizations, from the data center to the boardroom. Companies are seeking systems and tools capable of tackling the challenges of massive data growth. Integrated with Hadoop-based Information Chain Management (ICM) data services, MoPaaS enables organizations to deploy a central platform to solve end-to-end data problems that involve any combination of information ingestion, processing, storage, exploration, analytics, and retrieval. With MoPaaS enterprise developers can easily integrate sophisticated big data services with their applications as native Cloud Foundry services. These include log analysis, cloud storage and synchronization, information clustering, and customized search. In addition, with ICM data services, MoPaaS provides new capability for monitoring and managing applications on the cloud platform.

• Application portability: MoPaas architecture strictly separates PaaS from IaaS services. MoPaaS furnishes applications with an infrastructure-agnostic execution method, standardizes the method of exposing services such as databases, messaging and queuing, runtime, and management, and standardizes service credentials across runtimes. Thus MoPaaS keeps the applications portable in case they need to move the PaaS layer and application services to another infrastructure provider. Additionally, MoPaaS ICM mechanism enables automatic application data transferring along with the associated applications via its data synchronization service. Developers don’t have to worry about infrastructure-specific requirements for their applications, because the MoPaaS platform takes care of these concerns for them.

Summary

The initial success of Cloud Foundry-based PaaS providers demonstrates the strength of the Cloud Foundry open PaaS solution and the power of its open source ecosystem and community. This is a win for everyone invested in the success of Cloud Foundry.

We are excited to become the first company in China to join the Cloud Foundry Core community. By being a member of the Core ecosystem, Anchora is committed to the open PaaS concept and delivering cloud portability to Chinese application developers and service providers.

About the Author: Wei-Min Lu is the founder and CEO of Anchora. Anchora provides both MoPaaS, a public open cloud platform with extensions for mobile and data applications, and a dedicated PaaS solution that facilitates application consolidation and cloud platform portability for enterprises. Dr. Lu has over 15 years experience in product development and marketing. Before he founded Anchora in 2008, he served in key engineering and management positions at IBM and NASA-JPL. His background is in cloud computing, cybernetics, machine learning, information retrieval and storage technologies. Dr. Lu holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering/Math from CalTech and a B.Sc. from Tsinghua University, China.

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

As the world’s leading telecom, NTT Communications has experience delivering global cloud services to enterprise customers. Enterprises in Japan are seeking the openness, choice, agility and extensibility that an Open PaaS can provide.

In this guest blog, Hideki Kurihara, Product Lead for NTT Communications’ Global Cloud Services, explains why NTT Communications selected Cloud Foundry as the basis for its Cloudⁿ PaaS and why it chose to join Cloud Foundry Core.

We are excited to join the Cloud Foundry Core community as proof of our commitment to making cloud portability a reality for Japanese developers. As the world’s leading telecom, everyday we see customers interested in using PaaS to be more agile. But we also hear concerns about vendor lock-in and ability to meet the needs of a complex enterprise environment. We chose to build Cloudⁿ PaaS on top of Cloud Foundry because of its multi-cloud nature, ability to integrate with existing assets, and solid API foundation for adding management and monitoring features. Using Cloud Foundry as the base, we are extending Cloudⁿ PaaS for developers and enterprise customers in Japan. Together with other Cloud Foundry Core partners, we are delivering cloud portability to Japanese users as well as global users of Cloud Foundry.

The Drivers for Open PaaS in Japan

The customer community in Japan wants more agility, choice, extensibility and manageability when it comes to cloud. Customers across sectors are looking to innovate faster in response to a very dynamic environment. For example, cloud has been used extensively for emergency infrastructure services in response to recent natural disasters. There has been a sharp increase in demand for cloud services to support smartphone and tablet application development. More global businesses have started considering cloud services as part of their global IT standardization so applications can be ported on demand from one place to another.

Customers here also want choice – choice to add new frameworks and services, and even to port their applications back on-premise or to another provider in Japan and other countries. Enterprises tend to prefer customization to augment their business. But they also value industry or open standards in the services they consume so they can deploy their application assets in the most appropriate place. When it comes to PaaS, application portability needs to be taken more seriously. Open PaaS, that is PaaS based on an open or industry standard, is what customers are talking about here.

Choosing and Building a PaaS Around Cloud Foundry

Meeting the needs of developers and operations for a PaaS that is open, extensible, and easily managed in the enterprise environment is difficult. We chose to build Cloudⁿ PaaS on top of Cloud Foundry specifically because of its:

1) Openness and portability

2) Flexibility – in configuration and ability to integrate with existing enterprise assets and services

3) Extensibility – the ability to add frameworks and services, but even beyond that, to build UI based tools that make it easy to manage and add resources to applications and navigate very large installations

We’ve relied heavily on the open source nature of Cloud Foundry. We have added memcached, our own filesystem service, and support for Java web application servers (Resin/Resin Pro) so our customers’ existing applications can work seamlessly on Cloudⁿ PaaS. But Cloud Foundry Core provides our customers’ developers the choice to use a common floor of runtimes and services when programming their applications. This gives them assurance they can port their applications to a Cloud Foundry Core provider in another geography not served by NTT communications or to a Cloud Foundry instance in their data centers.

Once in their own data centers, customers typically have a heterogeneous mix of infrastructure on which they wish to deploy Cloud Foundry, depending on the SLA and tenancy models. We initially deployed Cloud Foundry on top of our Enterprise Cloud services platform using vSphere and vCloud Director. We use this instance as our own Cloud Foundry development environment and plan to use a similar environment for future enterprise/private PaaS. On the other hand, the public multi-tenant instance of Cloudⁿ PaaS has been deployed on a different cloud platform with attributes and services more tailored for developer centric markets.

Cloud Foundry is designed with sufficient flexibility to satisfy a huge variety of needs for PaaS environments. The Cloud Foundry system consists of several components, and users can set up their environment by choosing the necessary combination and number of components for their needs Fig. 1

Cloud Foundry supports a wide range of environments—from a private PaaS on a single server to a huge public PaaS on a cluster of over a thousand servers—and can be set up to suit the scale as well as its reliability and support features. Moreover, users can add components on demand, so it is possible to start with the minimum configuration and increase the scale as the load grows.

Enterprise integration is one key area where we see area for adding value to our customers on top of Cloud Foundry. The Cloud Foundry services gateway component addresses the ability to add enterprise data services that our customers request for HA, recovery, and backup. The service gateway itself is nothing more than a REST gateway for binding any service, but the real magic is in the service node implementation that allows multi-node deployments for HA and clustering. We are working to create our own multi-node deployments of services using this component such as the aforementioned filesystem and memcached services.

NTT Communications’ Customizations of Cloud Foundry for Enterprises in Japan

Although Cloud Foundry is a promising PaaS software solution that has many good features, as described above, it is still not perfect. For example, integration with other NTT Communications’ services was naturally not provided. Therefore, we have been making efforts to extend Cloud Foundry to meet the specific needs of our enterprise customers and developers in Japan.

Contributions and Customizations to Cloud Foundry

(1) Reliability of Cloud Foundry components

Because Cloud Foundry was a very young project when we started our development, NTT Communications and NTT R&D (Software Innovation Center) have been examining the performance and scalability of Cloud Foundry by conducting various tests and fixing any problems revealed by them. For example, we solved a problem involving an important component that was a single point of failure and a problem where some components could not be restored after failures by fixing the source code and adding additional external systems.

(2) Convenience of Cloud Foundry

Since convenience is important for commercial services, we created an installer for the virtual machine container (VMC), which is the console for PaaS users, and we are now developing a function for linking the VMC and version control systems such as Git.

(3) Control Panel for user application management

Although Cloud Foundry has a flexible component system as described above, it is essential to provide a more user-friendly environment to fully leverage its features. Therefore, we have developed a control panel that allows users to manage their applications on Cloudⁿ PaaS. The control panel displays a list of the user’s applications, information about each application, status of resources for each application instance, and each application’s logs that have been stored by means of Cloudⁿ PaaS services. Using the control panel, operators can flexibly scale-out or scale-up their applications instances. Fig. 2

Building a Cloud Foundry Community in Japan

The presence of active communities is indispensable in the long-term evolution of open source software. We launched the Japan Cloud Foundry Group and are fostering a developers’ and users’ community of Cloud Foundry in Japan. In addition, we will open the source code created by group members by committing them to the official Cloud Foundry repository, and we also provide the know-how in workshops.

About the Author: Hideki Kurihara is the Product Lead for Global Cloud Services, including PaaS, for NTT Communications. Prior to his current position, he was engaged in NTT Communications’ North American hosting and cloud business for 10 years, serving in managerial positions such as General Manager of the Enterprise Hosting business unit and Vice President of Global Product Strategy at its subsidiaries. Hideki holds a Master of Science degree from University of Tokyo in Japan and a Master of Business Administration degree from INSEAD in France.