Ubuntu nails colours to the CloudFoundry mast with OpenStack PaaS

OpenStack Summit Ubuntu backer Canonical has announced two major new projects with EMC-and-VMware offshoot Pivotal designed to bring Platform as a Service capabilities to all OpenStack implementations.

Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth claimed in the opening keynote of OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong on Tuesday that despite the “healthy innovation” that has seen 15-20 different projects around PaaS for OpenStack, it was “important to signal to our customers and to our partners who’s in the lead”.

With that, Canonical will be teaming up with CloudFoundry sponsor Pivotal on two main products.

First up it will look to offer a “charmed” up version of CloudFoundry – ie one using Ubuntu’s Juju service orchestration tool to help customers deploy PaaS cloud environments.

“Using Juju allow us to integrate more deeply into all of the existing parts of the ecosystem we’ve built over the years,” he said. “We’re going to test that on multiple OpenStacks and if there are any vendors in the room with OpenStack implementations we’d very much like to certify and test that on yours as well because this isn’t just for Ubuntu.”

The second is a joint OpenStack/CloudFoundry solution for customers which want to build infrastructure as a service and platform as a service with the same infrastructure for greater efficiencies.

“Take servers in the privacy of your own garage and with one command spin up both CF and OS as one product, one solution: Sharing resources, sharing databases, sharing infrastructure – super efficient, super fast,” he said.

The news doesn’t seem to have bothered Rackspace much, despite the OpenStack founder having rolled out its own PaaS offering, Solum, to muted response last month.

“More power to them,” Rackspace private cloud GM Jim Curry told The Reg.

“I don’t think [Solum and CloudFoundry] should be seen as mutually exclusive. One of the goals of open source is to enable choice. There’s not going to be a single platform solution or a single developer automation solution or application lifecycle solution – there'll be a lot of them.

“People should be allowed to experiment and build stuff and solve unique problems for customers.”

Nevertheless, with Ubuntu’s colours now nailed firmly to the Pivotal/Open Foundry mast, all the momentum in the OpenStack space would certainly seem to be with this platform, rather than Solum. ®