IBM COMMON STOCK (NYSE:IBM) took the wraps off its Cloud Foundry Enterprise Environment during the Cloud Foundry Summit in The Hague today. The company has brought together Cloud Foundry’s functionalities with OpenShift from Red Hat.
A perfect combo
Red Hat’s OpenShift, centered on Kubernetes was often considered a competitor for Cloud Foundry’s platform-as-a-service solution. However, IBM COMMON STOCK combined the capabilities of these two to bring a modern, enterprise-ready solution for business looking at better delivery platforms and application development environments.
The combination was possible because of a recent shift to Kubernetes at Cloud Foundry. The company found that it’s rival’s technological mainstay could be used for application deployment. It could also be used to contain and run the Cloud Foundry ecosystem.
Now that IBM COMMON STOCK has acquired Red Hat, it has brought the two ecosystems closer. Note that the tech giant has been a foundation member at Cloud Foundry and has backed the company for long.
Could it lead to something substantial?
As of now, the ecosystem revealed by IBM COMMON STOCK is still an experimental project but it is safe to say that the company may eventually want to make it a fully supported project. It would allow Cloud Foundry users to run their applications using OpenShift and to provide the same opportunity to OpenShift users as well.
Clio Childers, the CTO of Cloud Foundry Foundation commented,
“It’s another proof point that these things really work well together. That’s the developer experience that the CF community brings and in the case of IBM COMMON STOCK, that’s a great commercialization story for them.”
Their executive director Abby Kearns noted that developers are increasingly adopting Cloud Foundry’s platform because of its flexibility, agility, and speed.
Their business has matured over the years with initial hype declining. However, Cloud Foundry continues to be one of the most popular development platforms used by big enterprises. A recent user survey suggests that their clients are migrating newer development works on to the platform and they still bring in more than 50,000 commits on the platform every month. Kearns said that their platform is helping developers create and support emerging technologies.
The platform will also experience several other collaborations. Pivotal is expected to launch an alpha version of its Pivotal Application Service (PAS). The service is also based on Kubernetes. Note that the company is soon to be acquired by VMware. Additionally, Swisscom is expected to bring to its Application Cloud, which is based on Cloud Foundry. Swisscom is one of the early backers of the platform.
