

Man Survives Steve Ballmer’s Flying Chair To Build ’21st Century Linux’ - wallflower
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/11/cloud-foundry/

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teyc
For hackers, this is how PR is done. The hook is Steve Balmer's flying chair,
but the aim of the stsory is to position Cloud Foundry as what Microsoft
isn't. Very well done. If anything it might convince people to take a closer
look at it.

I had downloaded cloud foundry when it was announced but did little with it. I
might have a closer look again.

~~~
nikcub
As I was reading that story I was imagining the pitch email that was sent by
VMWare's PR team to this journalist.

Sometimes it is a little too artificial. You are right though, if you give
most writers an interesting hook, they will use it and then recite the
remainder of your pitch deck almost verbatim (as in this case)

~~~
wattersjames
Don't be so sure this started as a PR pitch...Cade has been covering Cloud
Foundry and Appfog since they adopted Cloud Foundry, see all of his articles
about it over at the Register, example:
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/13/appfog_adds_ruby_and...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/13/appfog_adds_ruby_and_node_dot_js/)

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antirez
Mark, that is my direct superior, and Derek, are the two guys that made
possible the whole Redis development funded by VMware story (together with a
CEO saying yes of course).

Also if Redis was left as a completely open source affair is thanks to both.

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bradneuberg
I used to work at Google near the Ajax APIs team and used to see Mark, Derek,
and Vadim hacking away. They are a talented bunch; when I heard they went to
VMware I was sure they would come out with something awesome, so its great to
see details on Cloud Foundry come out. Congrats!

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fkn
Kudos to VMWare for open-sourcing this, it'll be interesting to see how they
leverage this product. Google open-sourced Android because they wanted to have
people to search using Google on their mobile phone.

I am also quite amazed that a team of 6 was able to build this seemingly
complex product.

~~~
mccrory
That wasn't the entire team. The original team was only 3! It grew to larger
than 6 before Cloud Foundry launched in April (I'm talking specifically about
Engineers). If you add other people the team is far, far larger.

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jeswin
Sometimes I feel we went about embracing virtualization the wrong way. We
added instructions and changed silicon to efficiently run multiple, isolated
OSes on a single computer.

The bigger problem that needed fixing was how to make the hardware scale
transparently. I don't have any solutions to this of course. But I do imagine
that someday, a good team might build transparent virtualization that scales
over a network of connected nodes without having to code this explicitly.

~~~
rwmj
In some senses we have this already: with some clouds you just have to boot a
node from a tiny PXE image or a USB key, and it'll discover the cloud, join
in, and VMs will migrate onto it.

Unfortunately physics simply won't permit _transparent_ scaling of workloads
across nodes. For any application involving communication between parts
(anything not "embarrassingly parallel") messaging between the parts gets
slower and harder as the parts get further away and there are more of them
communicating. 1000 nodes have a million possible connections between them, so
you can't directly wire them. You need a switching fabric, so your messages
have to deal with multiple hops and contention -- slower and harder.

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warmfuzzykitten
HN doesn't go for snark, but it seems reasonable to observe that in the end we
will all survive Steve Ballmer, and projects like Cloud Foundry will be the
reason.

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mark_l_watson
I have tried it myself, with their beta hosted service - good stuff. I am very
happy with Heroku but something similar, open source, and multiple vendors is
also good.

~~~
caycep
so this is essentially an open source/VMware backed competitor to Heroku?

and Strobe for sproutcore is now facebooked i suppose

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gvb
So what is their business model? I'm happy they open sourced the project, but
they have to make money _somewhere_ to remain a viable business. The article
was unsatisfactorily vague about how VMware is going to make money off the
project.

~~~
smokinn
The article wasn't vague. It explicitly pointed out that there's no business
model at all yet:

 _Maritz says VMware doesn’t have a concentrate plan for making money from
Cloud Foundry. “A leap of faith,” he calls it._

I imagine the obvious business model though is to position themselves as the
world experts on this platform and provide hosting and support to enterprise
customers that would rather pay a premium for peace of mind as opposed to
startups that would shop around for the cheapest option.

~~~
danmaz74
For one, this puts VMWare in a very good light with engineers who might have
to choose a VM platform, just as with Redis. I confess that I generally like
Google because they gave away a lot to the community, this can work for VMWare
too. Kudos to them :)

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naner
Has anyone here built anything on top of Could Foundry yet?

~~~
jvoorhis
We're dogfooding at AppFog. We self-host our web management console (see
[http://blog.appfog.com/creating-your-first-app-in-appfog-
in-...](http://blog.appfog.com/creating-your-first-app-in-appfog-in-
under-5-minutes/)).

When we needed a staging environment, it was just an `af push` away.

~~~
andrewcooke
what's the relationship between appfog and cloud foundry? is appfog source
available? i just watched the video and it said "open source", but that seems
to refer to cf, not af? what does "registering" for appfog mean? is that pre-
registering? or does it exist? can i try it out? what do you pay for? please
forgive the questions, but i'm looking at all this for the first time and a
bit confused...

~~~
jvoorhis
CloudFoundry manages the application lifecycle of AppFog apps (deployment,
binding to services, etc.) What you see in the open source CloudFoundry
project is what we run on our servers, with minor changes in our private repo
that are specific to our product (e.g. billing).

We are now in our private beta program. Signing up at <http://appfog.com/>
places your email in our beta list, which we create accounts for regularly and
often.

We will announce paid subscription plans very soon, so stay tuned for the
details.

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jvoorhis
We at AppFog are extremely proud to be a part of the CloudFoundry ecosystem!

If you want to get involved and try CloudFoundry for yourself, add your email
to our list at <http://appfog.com/> and I will personally add you to our
private beta!

~~~
schrijver
added eric at ericschrijver.nl , curious!

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plam
I'm hesitant to build on these technology without information on the pricing.

~~~
yourapostasy
Very wise. VMWare has established a precedent with ESXi V4 starting out free,
then drastically changing terms, conditions, and pricing with V5. Their
prerogative of course, but there is no way I would build a business around
free beer software unless it was also free speech so I can fork it if I have
to. They have open sourced this code, so you can take a chance on it, but you
have to be certain there is enough of a critical mass of code commits from the
outside that it could fly on its own were VMWare to close it back up.

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listic
What I can't understand is how the hell Ballmer, who comes off like a clueless
psycho, managed to get and retain such high position at Microsoft?

~~~
twoodfin
He's a sales guy, and it's hard to overestimate just how much of Microsoft's
revenue depends on sales relationships with big, big companies.

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mccrory
Great write up about Cloud Foundry, Mark Lucovsky and Derek Collison

