So for me It will be "just" an "internal cloud" solution and maybe replace capistrano. Still, puppet and chef will do the "physical"/"system" provisioning for my customers and my projects.
Shared hosting is now called "Multi-tenant", and that is how Heroku, Google Appengine, Windows Azure and other multi-tenant PaaS hosters work. Their thousands of users don't seem to mind.
Currently the multi-tenancy is based on locked down unix users and permissions and other system hardening, pretty much same approach Heroku uses so you judge whether that's multi-tenant or not. We are looking into lightweight containers like lxc and friends for another implementation of the multi-tenancy.
First? How is this different from Heroku and other such folks?
That said, I think its a bit surprising that VMWare is launching this under their branding - the machinations of large corporations continuously confound me.
"Cloud Foundry serves as the basis for the VMforce platform cloud VMware is building in tandem with Salesforce.com. Therefore, Chen tells us, developers will be able to readily move applications between VMforce and other Cloud Foundry services"
So they are both apparently releasing differently branded versions of the same stack.
There is no history in the git repos, so not clear if any of the code comes from Heroku.
I am interested to see how it looks once it gets out of beta. I am betting it will be a solid platform, but after seeing the demo a few months ago at RubyConf, it did feel like a model I had seen before.
This is an interesting product to me, but from the marketing material it's not obvious...
From their terms of service:
b. Your Applications and Code. If You create online applications or program code using the Service, You authorize Cloud Foundry to host, copy, transmit, display and adapt such applications and program code, solely as necessary for Cloud Foundry to provide the Service in accordance with this Agreement. Subject to the above, Cloud Foundry acquires no right, title or interest from You or Your licensors under this Agreement in or to such applications or program code, including any intellectual property rights therein.
...and yet somehow you own exclusive rights to the data.
"..solely as necessary for Cloud Foundry to provide the Service..." is the key point, there.
It appears they're gaining the authorization required to run your app.
Though I wonder how much of it is really VMware specific, or if it would be relatively easy to port to Xen, etc.
Edit: actually it appears it might be agnostic to the virtualization layer.
Their core business today is selling vSphere 4 management with ESXi as the hypervisor, I think they see their core business in 10 years as being the management layer for your entire IT infrastructure, wherever it runs.
ESXi is excellent, I think one of the best x86 kernels in existence. The management software is nowhere near on par with it; it is finicky Windows software that doesn't match the hypervisor's speed or reliability. The long-rumoured Linux version of the management platform still has not materialised.
Node.js notwithstanding, this tastes from the start like a proper enterprise service.
This is a much needed service, and although some solutions already exist, they're far from perfect, and there's certainly lots of space for competition.
