Cloud Foundry Creating Massive Data Services Opportunity For Solution Providers
Cloud Foundry technology is creating huge opportunities for channel partners looking to generate new recurring revenues by providing data services. The ease of deploying and scaling the open source Platform as-a-Service is something that solution providers shouldn't overlook, said Oliver Wolf, lead platform engineer for data services specialist Anynines.
"I don't know of any systems that allows you this user experience to get your applications running that fast on production," said Wolf in an interview with CRN at the 2018 Cloud Foundry Summit in Boston. "There's a few simple commands you have to know to deploy your cloud native applications and scale them to multiple instances and that's very very easy. … If you look at other systems, there are lot more things you have to care about or a lot more things you have to study and know about to get productive with the systems. That's not what Cloud Foundry does. So Cloud Foundry provides a very simple interface that makes the user experience very good."
Cloud Foundry is an open source multi-cloud application PaaS run by the Cloud Foundry Foundation, backed by companies such as Dell EMC, Pivotal, Google, IBM, Microsoft, SAP and SUSE. Many of these vendors, including SAP and Pivotal, offer their own Cloud Foundry platform available to channel partners.
Cloud Foundry has become pervasive in enterprises and is increasingly important for systems integrators. The container-based architecture runs apps in any cloud and can easily integrate with existing technologies.
Anynines is a German-based solution provider that offers enterprise-ready data services based around Cloud Foundry. The company's a9s data services provides a wide variety of capabilities including self-healing service instances that automatically recover from VM failures and an API for automated backup and recovery. The services are all infrastructure and OS independent for fast scalability.
The simplicity of creating data services around Cloud Foundry solutions is partly due to an Open Service Broker API, which provides a simple to use interface.
"For example, we take that interface and implement a couple of open source services so that you're able to pluck into the Cloud Foundry marketplace," said Wolf. "Then you have this neatness user experience. You say, '[Cloud Foundry] push [command]. Here's my code. Please run it for me.' Then you say, '[Cloud Foundry] create service,' … A few commands and you have a production-ready system up and running."
Wolf was giving hands-on training at the summit to dozens of developers during his session, "Microservices on Cloud Foundry: Going Cloud Native." The 2018 Cloud Foundry Summit kicked off this week at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center and runs until April 20.