Alibaba Cloud joins Cloud Foundry as gold member
Alibaba Cloud announced it is deploying Cloud Foundry on its infrastructure alongside joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation as a gold member.
Cloud Foundry is an open source, multi-cloud application platform-as-a-service governed by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. According to the foundation, this integration will ensure seamless interaction between Alibaba Cloud and Cloud Foundry.
Alibaba Cloud is recognized as China’s largest cloud infrastructure provider and among the three largest globally. It provides a suite of cloud computing services, such as elastic computing, object storage, relational database, big data analysis and artificial intelligence, in 43 availability zones around the globe, according to the company.
“Being the first open source PaaS offering, Cloud Foundry is designed for multi-cloud, multi-framework and multi-languages,” said Hong Tang, chief architect of Alibaba Cloud. “Alibaba Cloud commits itself to providing more choices for our customers and is, as always, dedicated to the open source community.”
Open source is starting to take off in China; although, Chinese government agencies and corporations have been taking advantage of it since the mid-2000s. While adoption was originally slow, major Chinese tech companies like Huawei, Baidu and Alibaba Cloud have made significant code contributions to the open source community.
Gold is the second-highest Cloud Foundry Foundation membership level behind platinum, whose members include Cisco, Dell EMC, IBM, Pivotal, SAP, SUSE and VMware. As a gold member of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, Alibaba Cloud joins the ranks of Microsoft, Google, Huawei, Swisscom, among others.
The Cloud Foundry Foundation benefits from Alibaba Cloud’s membership in being able to boost its present in China’s market. At the same time, Alibaba Cloud will be able to access both Cloud Foundry Application Runtime (CFAR) and Cloud Foundry Container Runtime (CFCR) workloads. The Cloud Foundry Foundation noted CFCR is a Kubernetes and BOSH-based technology that it houses.
“Alibaba is a dominant force in China, and throughout Asia, the availability of Cloud Foundry now on Alibaba Cloud represents an opportunity to expand the availability of Cloud Foundry,” said Abby Kearns, executive director of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. “Now China-based enterprises can experience the combined benefits of Cloud Foundry and Alibaba Cloud together.”
