

How Cloudfuji (S11) uses Cloud Foundry to make open source Apps big business - sgrove
http://blog.cloudfoundry.com/2012/06/07/cloudfuji-accelerates-delivery-of-its-open-source-application-store-with-cloud-foundry/

======
shykes
Cloudfoundry is really intriguing to me. On the one hand cf-based vendors
point out the awesome acceleration effect of many companies contributing to a
common codebase. Yet they all emphasize their unique value-add compared to
vanilla cf and everyone else - which they do by maintaining a private fork and
not contributing back upstream. Aren't these 2 things mutually exclusive and
slightly hypocritical?

~~~
wattersjames
Solomon, wait, just 2 days ago you said CF was throw away code and not on your
radar? Care to explain your pivot to 'intriguing'?

<https://twitter.com/solomonstre/status/209895170194423808>

~~~
shykes
Hi James, in this tweet I'm referring to phpfog, which has been publicly
deprecated (the polite term for "throwing away the code") in favor of a
cloudfoundry deployment. Not necessarily a bad move in their situation... but
yes, as a result it is not a very fearsome contender in the paas market.

~~~
shykes
I just looked you up and found out you're a cloud foundry evangelist. Would
love to hear your thoughts on my original question. In your experience do
cloudfoundry resellers contribute all of their customizations? Do they
sometimes emphasize non-contributed extensions as key differentiators? And if
so do you see this as a possible concern for the cohesion of the project? Do
you (vmware) do anything to discourage (or perhaps encourage) this behavior?

~~~
wattersjames
I'm not an evangelist, but I am a member of the Cloud Foundry team, and
responsible for partner development and ecosystem.

I think you are creating a straw man question as the overwhelming majority of
partners have open sourced most/all of the applicable code. Take a look at
<http://www.ironfoundry.org> for instance from Tier3 who has taken a very
liberal approach to open source with their Cloud Foundry based service.

Appfog has also contributed back their code for PHP to Cloud Foundry. They are
doing a very nice job of expanding the potential deployment targets as one of
their competitive advantages (HP, Joyent, most EC2 regions).

Thus to answer your question I've seen robust contributions back with a very
liberal amount of open source code, and a focus on value-add through service
delivery options.

I'm curious about your view of the hybrid deployment model many of our users
prefer with an on-prem instance that can be deployed to multiple service
providers.

~~~
shykes
_"I'm curious about your view of the hybrid deployment model many of our users
prefer with an on-prem instance that can be deployed to multiple service
providers."_

I see these as 2 separate things:

\- By "on-prem instance" I'm guessing you're referring to a local VM which
mimics the remote deployment target? I think that is a cool and useful feature
in the "nice-to-have" category.

\- By "can be deployed to multiple service providers", I guess you mean that
the portability between cf-enabled providers frees developers from lock-in? In
my opinion this solves a non-existing problem. Developers can already deploy
to multiple service providers with almost zero effort, because all service
providers rely on open standards for deploying web applications. As a result
portability is incredibly good between dotCloud, Heroku, Cloudfoundry and
almost everybody else. Of course it's up to the developer to not lock
themselves into proprietary APIs which are only available on certain service
providers (eg. App Engine).

------
seltzered_
Love what you're doing, but I couldn't figure out how to export my fatfreecrm
data in case I ever have to move away from cloudfuji. Is there a way to do
this?

~~~
sgrove
There isn't a standard way right now, though we'd be happy to add that in! In
the most manual case, we can give you any kind of database export you'd like.

Our goal is to make the data for a user _owned_ by the user - so when you move
from Fat Free CRM to Salesforce, your data follows you without any special
config at all.

If anyone contacts us for a data export right now, we'll take care of it
ourselves and send it over :)

------
johnx123-up
Is custom domain possible? I heard that CF doesn't support custom domain.

~~~
sgrove
Yup, custom domains are possible on Cloudfuji, because we're running the vast
majority on Cloud Foundry OSS, which does support custom domains.

CloudFoundry.com doesn't support custom domains yet while it's in beta, but
I'm sure it's on its way and should be available as they make their way out of
beta.

------
jasontraff
Love these guys and the work they're doing!

