Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Is Cloud Foundry a PaaS?

I've been asking some people in the industry a real simple question, "Is Cloud Foundry a Platform as a Service"?

The obvious answer would seem to be "yes" - after all, VMware told us it's a PaaS:

That should be the end of it, right? For some reason, when I hear "as-a-Service", I expect a "service" - as in Service Oriented. I don't think that's too much to ask. For example, when Amazon released their relational data service, they offered me a published service interface:
https://rds.amazonaws.com/doc/2010-07-28/AmazonRDSv4.wsdl

I know there are people who hate SOAP, WS-*, WSDL, etc. - that's cool, to each their own. If you prefer, use the RESTful API: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonRDS/latest/APIReference/

Note that the service interface IS NOT the same as the interface of the underlying component (MySQL, Oracle, etc.), as those are exposed separately.

Back to my question - is Cloud Foundry a PaaS?

If so, can someone point me to the WSDL's, RESTful interfaces, etc?

Will those interfaces be submitted to DMTF, OASIS or another standards body?

Alternatively, is it merely a platform substrate that ties together multiple server-side technologies (similar to JBoss or WebSphere)?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

vmc with the -t flag shows the restful/JSON messages.

Internally NATS messages are JSON as well.

So yes, there is an API and yes, it is accessible. There are even other clients written using this same API.

Ping me on Twitter @mccrory if you have more questions.