Sam Ramji Discusses Cloud Foundry and Open Source Opportunities
Cloud Foundry Foundation, positioned as a global standard creator for open Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and cloud applications, announced its launch as an independent nonprofit foundation late last year, and recently named a very well-known open source leader as its CEO: Sam Ramji (shown here). Ramji has worn several hats in the open source community, and we covered him previously when he headed up Microsoft’s open source initiatives.
Cloud Foundry is managed as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project and operates under a system of open governance created by a team of open source experts from founding Platinum Members EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Pivotal, SAP and VMware. Ramji has a big job with Cloud Foundry Foundation, where he can help drive many meaningful open source projects forward. OStatic recently caught up with him for his thoughts on his new role.
Ramji emphasizes that organizations are effectively becoming cloud service and application providers.
“Companies everywhere are having to make software and cloud services part of their core competencies,” Ramji said. “Every one of them needs to leverage applications from a limited supply of application developers. So for an open source project to efficiently gather good developers to create code that they can all share —that’s a big core benefit.”
In fact, Ramji noted that Cloud Foundry and the applications and collaboration that it helps to nurture can contribute to “the art of scaling infrastructure” for many organizations.
The Cloud Foundry Foundation is very focused on these kinds of development and collaboration efficiencies. It has implemented an approach to open source development called Dojo, which is derived from the Pivotal Labs Dojo program. This offers developers what Ramji characterizes as a unique “fast track” for commit rights, development resources and more. Ramji notes that it can typically take more than a year for a developer to gain committer status on a given open source project. In some cases, it can take longer.
Through Dojo, Ramji said, skilled, and often very proven engineers from Cloud Foundry’s community can participate in development alongside committers on a Cloud Foundry project team.
In addition, Cloud Foundry benefits from its connection to The Linux Foundation, which has a proven record as a steward of open source projects and collaboration.
“The Linux Foundation is a parent that has already gathered a strong collection of developers and resources,” Ramji said. “It’s a not-for-profit foundation that is very helpful in providing resources for collaboration. It will provide help and resources to Cloud Foundry on an ongoing basis.”
“[Cloud Foundry] has seen some real momentum including customer wins with two of the top three U.S. telcos and seven Global 500 manufacturing companies,” Forbes recently noted. Sam Ramji is a proven quantity who promises to drive Cloud Foundry Foundation toward many further successes.
Editor's Note: This story is the latest in a series of interview pieces with project leaders working on the cloud, Big Data, and the Internet of Things. The series has included talks with Rich Wolski who founded the Eucalyptus cloud project, Ben Hindman from Mesosphere, Tomer Shiran of the Apache Drill project, Philip DesAutels who oversees the AllSeen Alliance, Tomer Shiran on MapR and Hadoop, and co-founder of Mirantis Boris Renski.