Tier 3 Takes on Microsoft in the Cloud with an Open Source Platform

by Sam Dean - Dec. 16, 2011Comments (0)

Could workloads and business processes based on Microsoft's .NET framework represent an entry point for new open source cloud computing platforms? Apparently Tier 3 believes that's the case. The company has taken VMware's Cloud Foundry PaaS-based cloud platform, which we covered here, forked it into a new Iron Foundry cloud computing platform, and contributed Iron Foundry to the open source community.

"This contribution gives the industry’s fastest growing open source PaaS an implementation based on the popular development framework, .NET," Tier 3 reports in announcing Iron Foundry. According to some, Tier 3's platform could represent a strong, open source-based alternative to Microsoft's Azure platform.

Microsoft is working to establish Azure as a top cloud computing platform, and pitching it to enterprises as the platform that works with its own components and infrastructure best. Among Microsoft-led infrastructure tools, .NET is already firmly entrenched in many enterprises.

But Savio Rodrigues reports that Tier 3's platform could be an open source rival to Azure to take seriously:

"It seems to have been natural to start with the Cloud Foundry code and extend it to support .Net. Tier 3 is continuing its efforts to better align elements of the core Cloud Foundry code for using .Net technologies in areas such as command-line support in Windows, which Cloud Foundry supports through a Ruby application. Tier 3 is also working with the Cloud Foundry community to contribute elements of Iron Foundry back into Cloud Foundry and into the Tier 3-led IronFoundry.org open source project."

Targeting .NET is a shrewd strategy. For years, Microsoft has kept many enterprises tied to its tools and platforms by leveraging key infrastructure tools that enterprises already use, ranging from Microsoft Exchange to .NET-based processes. The .NET framework supports many programming languages and is primarily used in Microsoft Windows environments.

At Tier 3, we believe that PaaS is so universal and so foundational to the adoption of cloud for web applications that it should be an open source framework,” said Jared Wray, chief technology officer, Tier 3, in a statement. “As enterprises accelerate the deployment of their mission-critical applications to the cloud, the need for a .NET-based Cloud Foundry PaaS in the marketplace was acute. As fans of the open source nature of Cloud Foundry – and as a .NET based-cloud platform ourselves – we were excited to take on this opportunity to support the enterprise developer and open source communities and to foster innovation for the cloud.”

"It'll be interesting to see how Microsoft and VMware react to Iron Foundry over time," notes Rodrigues. Indeed, VMware's CEO, Paul Maritz, was a longtime Microsoft Executive, and is intimately familiar with how Microsoft approaches enterprises tied to Windows and Microsoft's infrastructure tools. At VMware, he has made shrewd moves to compete effectively with Microsoft in many areas. Both Tier 3's platform and VMware's Cloud Foundry are worth watching as Microsoft continues to try to woo enterprises onto its Azure cloud platform.