Last week, VMware unveiled the company's new open source platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud offering called Cloud Foundry. The new cloud service promises to make it much easier for developers to get started with creating applications within a "platform cloud" or a "development cloud."

CloudFoundry.org is a community-driven open source project led by VMware, and the community is free to download and build their own open source Cloud Foundry environment. At the same time, VMware will also host and operate its own managed environment on CloudFoundry.com, currently in beta. At the end of the beta phase, this hosted commercial cloud offering will become a paid solution, but pricing has not yet been disclosed. The company also announced a Micro Cloud offering, a free download for developers who want to build a single instance of this PaaS on their local machines.

Currently, the Cloud Foundry platform lets you build applications with Spring for Java (acquired by VMware from SpringSource back in August 2009), Ruby on Rails, the Ruby framework Sinatra, and Node.js. Other JVM-based frameworks like Grails are also supported. VMware stated it plans to expand support to other languages in the near future as well.

Cloud Foundry will plug into the messaging technology framework from RabbitMQ and the data management platform from GemStone, both now owned by VMware. It also supports several other application services such as MySQL, MongoDB, and Redis. VMware expects to grow that support list in the coming months to include other technologies, including the company's own vFabric application service.

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