The addition of “external committers” to the project could ease tensions brewing among some Cloud Foundry backers — companies that built their own PaaSes atop the Cloud Foundry framework.

But then again, the fact that Pivotal is now selling software/support could open new areas of contention with partners that may want to do the same thing. Such is the life of an open source project where coopetition is the rule of engagement.

As set forth in a new blog post, Cloud Foundry is going to add “full-time external committers” to the process. Governance and openness had been an ongoing issue with the PaaS project according to an exec with one Cloud Foundry vendor. “We just didn’t have any visibility into what was going on [inside the project],” he said.

He would like to see the whole effort turned over to a vendor-neutral foundation for management, as Rackspace did with OpenStack and IBM did with Eclipse. That didn’t happen here but the addition of outside committers is a step in the right direction and, to be fair, some folks in the OpenStack community complained that Rackspace took its sweet time to make its move.

Lucas Carlson, CEO of AppFog, another Cloud Foundry backer, said he’s seen other good signs from Cloud Foundry. He is thrilled, for example, that the code is back on a public Github repository. It had been removed some time ago. “We see it as a sign of a more open approach from the Cloud Foundry team,” he said.

Collaborators or competitors: a fine line

Some history: The worry initially was that Cloud Foundry, despite all the talk of open-source goodness and just plain openness, was too closely associated with one vendor:  VMware. Then, when VMware spun it off to a VMware-and-EMC-backed entity (Pivotal) there was more uncertainty about its future.

There was also concern that some of the Cloud Foundry players were going to take the work they’d done and fork the project altogether because of the lack of visibility into Cloud Foundry plans. Under this definition a “fork” — and yes, I’ll get hate mail on this — that could lead to the creation of several not-always-compatible versions of a project.

For some in the open source community, there is no such thing as a bad fork.But for mere mortals there is worry about an actual ecosystem divergence when many members of the same community start getting their updates from different places instead of relying on a central source, in this case Pivotal. To be fair, there is analogous concern that several versions of OpenStack backed by many vendors — some contributing back more than others — will lead to the same problem. At any rate, that’s the kind of angst Pivotal is trying to lay to rest.

In Thursday’s blog post, James Watters, head of product for Cloud Foundry, reiterated that the project will support multiple clouds, promising “open interfaces, support and continued development on AWS, OpenStack, vCloud and vSphere environments.”

And, he maintained, that the addition of outside committers was always a goal:

” … we are engaged with several organizations about putting dedicated resources on the extended engineering team –we believe this to be a very important step forward. The scale of these external investments is significant and a major milestone in our growth. The heart of Cloud Foundry, however, really comes from individual community contributions and users, so of course, we invite you to join us. All you need to do is send a pull-request.”

Going  orward it will be interesting to see what engineers from which companies will be added as committers. For now, the naysayers appear to be relieved at what Cloud Foundry has done.

Watters endorsed Cloud Foundry’s existing “corporate sponsored, Apache 2 licensed, pull request driven approach” as the right way to go. The outside committers will open up the process going forward, but he also left the door open to further changes. He wrote: “The massive growth of the community and ecosystem requires mediating a diverse set of needs and we will always be open to other governance models for the project in the future.”

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The attraction of the multi-vendor Cloud Foundry effort is that, in theory, it would provide customers an array of compatible PaaSes from different vendors. If they don’t like their experience with one, they can move their code elsewhere. But now the prospect of a “fork” looms with some other vendors thinking of splitting off and doing their own iterations. Worst case scenario: that could negate any promise of compatibility. And that raises the old bugaboo of vendor lock-in which even PaaS providers say has restricted business demand for PaaSes.

Some background: late last year, VMware turned over the Cloud Foundry effort and related projects to the Pivotal Initiative spinoff. Since then some of the third-party Cloud Foundry crowd have complained that they have not gotten information  they need from Pivotal. And, they worry that Pivotal or VMware will push its own commercial, competitive version of Cloud Foundry. And so they privately discussed forking the Cloud Foundry code. Any fork or forks raises the specter of a fractured standard.

Sinclair Schuller, CEO of Apprenda, a non-Cloud Foundry PaaS, raised a ruckus last week when he posted his take on the impact of any fork or forks on Cloud Foundry. (Long story short: it will be bad for customers, Schuller wrote.) That caused a kerfuffle which Redmonk analyst Stephen O’Grady addressed in his  blog post. O’Grady tried to downplay the negative impact of forks, writing:

“We reject the notion that forking is an undesirable outcome. Forking is, to the contrary, provably beneficial to modern open source projects – at least from a developmental perspective.”

But O’Grady also conceded that, because Cloud Foundry is not licensed under the General Public License (GPL) — as Linux was — it faces different issues;

“Compatibility, ultimately, is the key to determining whether the forks which are so beneficial to development are a problem for customers. Java, for example, had multiple distinct implementations, which ensured competition and thus continued innovation to benefit customers.”

In his own blog post, cloud pundit Ben Kepes cites “tensions in the Cloud Foundry world, ” and maintains the possibility of a fork should concern customers.

“Quite simply a fork, or even worse multiple forks, too early in a project is a sign of bad governance and questions the validity of the entire initiative. Let me reiterate – these are very early days and any doubt that factions in the community sow in end users minds are wildly damaging to the community. This is especially the case since, from what I’m hearing, some of the conversation around forking is happening for all the wrong reasons – it comes down to vendors making the right decisions for the right reasons.”

I’ve asked Cloud Foundry and some of the third-party PaaS providers for comment and will update this when they get back to me.

Photo courtesy of  Flickr user Marshall Astor – Food Fetishist

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To add more transparency, Cloud Foundry is now offering now offering an application to help customers check out what features and services are available from any public CloudFoundry endpoint.

 Cloud Foundry Core, which went live Tuesday morning “will give you a real-time glimpse of what any Cloud Foundry endpoint will support,” said James Watters, director of ecosystem development for Cloud Foundry

According to the web site:

To promote cloud portability across different instances of Cloud Foundry, Cloud Foundry Core defines a baseline of common capabilities for different Cloud Foundry instances. Further, it provides an open mechanism that lets anyone instantly validate and confirm the specific frameworks and applications supported by a particular instance of Cloud Foundry and whether it supports Cloud Foundry Core.

Lucas Carlson, CEO of AppFog, which now claims 100,000 applications running on its PaaS, is bullish on the new app, calling it “a step forward in PaaS transparency, proving interoperability can exist and giving enterprises more comfort in taking the leap to PaaS.”

Carlson says business PaaS adoption will remain stalled until customers can be assured that their applications can be moved from platform to platform as needed.

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Shadow IT projects crop up in much the same way. Gridlocked by the processes and protocols imposed by IT management, developers very often give in to the temptation of moving their projects outside where they can progress faster. These “shadow IT” or “dark ops” which happen when developers go outside the firewall — spinning up and provisioning their work on beyond-the-firewall cloud resources to support time-sensitive project delivery. These efforts typically happen without the knowledge of IT (or accounting) departments.

Dark ops: a symptom of impatience, colliding objectives

Dark ops emerge when dev/devops teams hit communication breakdowns, governance constraints, and resource limitations. The whole rationale for the devops movement — in which company developers and operations people — who often work at cross purposes — are encouraged to work together to build, then deploy,  incremental software updates and improvements. It sometimes doesn’t work that way, hence the rogue developer.  sometimes that’s because IT management has implied or stated outright that it doesn’t have the time, in-house skills, resources, or desire to deal with their projects. At the same time, developers are under pressure to innovate to keep the enterprise competitive.

The public cloud breakdown lane: tempting, but risky

Look at it from the developer’s perspective. Would you jump into the dark ops breakdown lane? Cloud offerings such as Amazon’s Web Services are tempting, quick options for developers looking for bandwidth, scale, and resources, without having to go through time-consuming IT channels. But without IT’s involvement, issues abound.

For instance, think of the “success-failure” scenario: What happens if the shadow project is a successful trial, and corporate end users demand broader rollout? IT has to integrate that shadow project back into the corporate network, connecting it to legacy applications, databases, and service frameworks. Trying to do that after the project is already under way is far more difficult and resource-intensive than if IT were involved in plans from the start.

Even worse: What if the third-party service provider suffers an outage or a security breach? IT is a corporate risk manager, and determines maximum tolerable failure windows, necessary protections against data theft/loss, and how often to back up data on-site. In addition, IT constantly measures corporate cloud utilization to avoid overage costs that can get out of hand. It’s not likely that a developer would consider these critical factors when purchasing immediately available public-cloud VMs. In most organizations, the developer’s understandable lunge towards Shadow IT can expose the company to risk and unnecessary expense.

So, how do you foster developer creativity and still maintain IT control?

1. Embrace dark ops culture

Resolve the culture wars being waged by your development and IT teams. In spite of their respective biases, developers and IT management share a common goal: to do what’s right for the company. If your devs are going rogue, review your deployment administrative processes. It’s a problem if they aren’t following the rules, but it’s a much bigger problem if your rules are hindering developers’ ability to innovate. Acknowledge the developer’s lament: “Don’t make me write another report! I’d rather be coding!” Then empower them: They want to be able to provision their apps. Take advantage of virtualization technologies to enable that.

2. Invest in the cloud

Instead of imposing arcane processes on the dev team, establish new infrastructure to support the best way for them to work. If your devs want to go to the cloud, give them a cloud to go to. If you need to keep data in-house, get a private cloud and give your devs control over their own piece of the sky. Otherwise, outsource your hosting to a public-cloud provider. The important thing is that your devs can spin up VMs and not have to wait weeks for approval to do so.

On the IT side, set up management and control procedures— as non-intrusively as possible—to make dev cloud work visible. Middleware in public or private PaaS models can provide sophisticated cloud management solutions for IT without burdening devs with overhead administration.

3. Collaborate

Hold a hackathon. Bring your teams together for a day or even a week to brainstorm on new ideas, build prototypes, and learn from each other. Make multi-day quarterly hackathons open to all employees and impose just one rule: work must benefit the company. Hackathons can get your teams thinking creatively, boost morale, and make your company and products better.

4. Open up your enterprise’s breakdown lane

With mutual respect established, virtualization options made available, and team collaboration under way, you’ll see positive changes in the enterprise developer/IT relationship. That unity will lead to faster, more cost-effective, and less-risky research and development. Open communication and mutual respect will focus your team on what’s important: moving the enterprise forward. You just have to open up that extra lane to get past the traffic.

Bart Copeland, CEO of ActiveState, a cloud software provider, will be speaking at GigaOM’s Structure Europe in Amsterdam later this month. 

Feature photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Viktor Gladkov

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You’ve heard the cloud marketing spiel … faster, better, cheaper. Those are seductive adjectives. But for some organizations, cloud benefits like that can remain out of reach. Cloud Computing is just so…new, and as some industry experts have oh-so-astutely noted, “much can go wrong.” And that’s reason enough for many to fear cloud computing.

But it shouldn’t be enough to preclude it. Perhaps it goes without saying, but your enterprise will enjoy the cloud’s benefits only with the commitment of organizational buy-in. Will your enterprise’s cloud-computing initiatives succeed? Let’s hope so. Winning in the cloud isn’t difficult, but it’s also not guaranteed. If you’re an IT leader, avoid these rookie mistakes … or your enterprise cloud might just rain down on you.

1. Plan for yesterday

It’s classic IT short-sightedness: “Invest now and relieve your immediate pain!” But here’s the thing: Cloud computing changes everything. Yesterday’s planning involved provisioning hardware for a ten-year lifespan. Today’s planning involves spinning up 10,000 VMs. Overnight. Yes, you must migrate your legacy apps to the cloud. But you also must ensure your cloud supports new, as-yet unimagined, multi-component, polyglot-developed, infinitely-modifiable, dynamically-redeployable applications. That is hardly the status quo now.

Today — yes, today –your application developers are leveraging the cloud to work in completely new ways. Cloud computing has the power to change the way your team thinks about delivering customer value. Change the way you think about IT management. Start from your end user customers and work backwards up the value chain. Then map out a cloud computing strategy to get there. You’ll end up with an IT org that’s proactively strategizing for the future instead of reacting to yesterday’s pain point.

2. Go public…if you’re big

How big is your enterprise? How costly is downtime? How much of a control freak are you? If you answered “massive,” “massively costly,” and “massively type-A,” then the public cloud probably isn’t for you. Outages—though extremely rare—can still occur. “Four nines” uptime sounds great, but it’s also unrealistic. Can your org can handle downtime if your public-cloud data is unavailable?

Public cloud is a great IT-outsourcing option…in a one-size-fits-all kind of way. And when something goes wrong in a public cloud, remember that you’ve also outsourced disaster recovery (and limited your own visibility into recovery efforts). No big deal as long as you don’t mind twiddling your thumbs while someone in hosting tech support seeks the root cause of that outage in the Eastern zone.

3. Go private…if you’re small

Private cloud is great, but it’s not right for everyone. Is your enterprise a small business? If you’re looking at a private cloud solution (even a dedicated hosted solution), expect significant upfront investment in hardware, maintenance, and IT management. Or, look at something more convenient like a cloud hosting provider service. And get to the cloud…faster, better, cheaper.

4. Don’t worry about security

Public cloud providers deliver best-in-world security. And it’s fast and easy to push data to a public cloud like AWS. Your proprietary data’s safe there. Probably. But public-cloud breaches — though extremely rare — (say it with me) can still occur. And they can be costly. (What’s your cloud data worth to you?)

“Hoping for the best” is not a sustainable strategic approach. Plan for redundancy and disaster recovery, whether your cloud is public or private. The private cloud route can be safer, but security is under your control (and as good as your own firewall). In a public cloud, consider advanced security layers—Some private PaaSes served from a public cloud can “individually wrap” your applications, so if a neighboring tenant gets hacked, your data stays protected.

5. Ignore data sovereignty

Does your enterprise have international operations? With most public cloud services, enterprise customers have little control over where their data resides. That’s a sticking point for companies doing business in jurisdictions that require corporate or public sector data to remain within a specific geography. If adhering to such data sovereignty mandates is a priority for your enterprise, consider a private cloud solution…running in your organization’s own datacenters in the appropriate subsidiaries.

6. Wait

Don’t wait and see. Cloud computing’s not a fad. It’s a game-changer. And if you’re not moving to the cloud, then you’re Goliath and your nimble competitor is David, using cloud-computing models to advantage. The sooner your enterprise gets to the cloud, the sooner you’ll realize its benefits.

Bart Copeland, CEO of ActiveState will speak about the evolution of  private PaaS adoption on a panel at GigaOM’s upcoming Structure Europe conference in Amsterdam. 

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user  Vladitto

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Last December, Uhuru launched a beta its PaaS but went back to add a new management console and integration to  popular applications including WordPress (see disclosure), SugarCRM and Magento and its own file storage service. Users of some other PaaSes rely on Amazon  S3 storage. The revamped AppCloud Ready to Go was available as a private beta in late June and has since signed 1,100 developers, Surkan said.

Uhuru was founded by two Microsoft veterans: Jawak Khaki, a former corporate VP, and Jawaid Ekram, former GM of Live Meeting services.

Uhuru’s service competes with ActiveState’s Stackato, AppFog and Tier3, which are offering cross-platform Cloud Foundry-based PaaSes of their own. There is some debate, however, about whether multi-platform PaaSes really are better than their language-specific counterparts. Companies like ActiveState, Apprenda  and AppHarbor are pitching their .NET platforms as providing better, deeper integration and support of that Microsoft technology.

Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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The Palo Alto, Calif. startup, which is emerging from stealth with $1 million in seed funding from Google Ventures and Foundation Capital, was co-founded by VMware vet Gaurav Manglik who is CEO.

“CliQr’s Cloud Center will run your apps on one or more clouds and companies don’t have to change their apps to do so,”Manglik said in an interview Monday.

Perhaps as importantly, it claims to enable those X86 Windows and Linux applications to be moved — without modification — from one cloud to another. Such cloud interoperability or the lack thereof was a hot topic of conversation at last week’s GigaOM Structure conference where Rackspace president Lew Moorman warned (again) about potential for cloud lock-in when companies use higher end cloud services of Amazon(a amzn).

CliQr, which launches Tuesday, supports Amazon, Rackspace and Hewlett-Packard public clouds and OpenStack-based private clouds.

Secret sauce = orchestration layer

What CliQr is attempting here is to solve a big, complicated problem. “Our secret sauce is our core orchestrator technology — at the cloud and app level. This is common code that runs on every cloud that specs out how the cloud runs the app. From the application’s perspective, that abstracts out the cloud’s inner workings,” he said. “It’s more than abstracting out the APIs — we have to maintain the virtual machine images on each cloud and figure out the right way to do storage and cluster management,” Manglik said.

CliQr will not charge for migrating the apps to the cloud, but then will charge on a per user basis for managing those applications, maintaining their runtime, scaling and security.

A few companies are now attacking this legacy app problem with PaaSes. Red Hat’s OpenShift, which will be a topic at Red Hat Summit this week, is doing so in the enterprise Linux world.  Appcara and Appzero are also attacking aspects of this problem. ActiveState’s Stackato 2.0 release will move existing .NET applications to the cloud as well.

“It’s an open question if companies will move their big, heavy custom-built legacy applications to the cloud and these [CliQr] guys are focusing on an easy on-boarding process to put those apps into the cloud and then make sure you get your money’s worth when they’re up there,” said Dave Bartorelli, lead analyst for Forrester Research.

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