Yesterday, VMware previewed the first concrete evidence that they are moving forward on the OpenPaaS initiative, the VMware Cloud OS, and VMforce at the 2010 Ruby Conference in New Orleans. At the conference Derek Collison demonstrated an early preview of the VMware Cloud OS via. a command line interface that he and Ezra Zygmuntowicz created.
The demonstration included showing Ruby code being auto deployed (pushed) into an a VM (where it becomes an App), coming online and then scaling both up and down in real-time. Also shown in the presentation itself was a screenshot of the control panel providing a view into what is being referred to as an application centric view of PaaS.
In addition, the architecture was described, covering how the system is coordinated for auto-scaling and how resources are controlled. Below is the high level architecture that was presented, a more detailed and in-depth walkthrough of how the system works will be published on this blog tomorrow.
VMware is moving quickly to fully support all modern/popular languages in the Cloud OS, including:
- Ruby
- Java
- Node.js
- Python
- .NET
- and more!
This strategy is critical to VMware being able to uplift itself from being considered a purely infrastructure company, to that of a Platform company (beyond owning SpringSource). It is also important to VMware in attempting to grab developer mindshare by trying to better meet the capabilities that developers have traditionally been going to the Public Cloud for, by enabling Enterprises to provide those same capabilities internally (real Private Clouds).
Several more posts to follow very soon…
Data Gravitas 
I think as a company that deals with technology which is ever evolving, it is definitely necessary for VMware to keep improving and upgrading its framework and structural layout. Whether it is the need of increasing its virtual storage capacity or just upgrading to a new version, they should all be made mandatory in order to stay on par with other developers.