On the eve of this week’s VMworld conference in Las Vegas, VMware announced that Micro Cloud Foundry is finally available for general distribution. This new offering is a completely self-contained instantiation of the company’s Cloud Foundry PaaS solution, which I wrote about earlier this spring. Micro Cloud Foundry comes packaged as a virtual machine, easily distributable on a USB key (as they proved at today’s session on this topic at VMworld), or as a quick download. The distribution is designed to run locally on your laptop without any external dependencies. This allows developers to code and test Cloud Foundry apps offline, and deploy these to the cloud with little more than some simple scripting. This may be the killer app PaaS needs to be taken seriously by the development community.
The reason Micro Cloud Foundry appeals to me is that it fits well with my own coding style (at least for the small amount of development I still find time to do). My work seems to divide into two different buckets consisting of those things I do locally, and the things I do in the cloud. More often than not, things find themselves in one bucket or the other because of how well the tooling supports my work style for the task at hand.
As a case in point, I always build presentations locally using PowerPoint. If you’ve ever seen one of my presentations, you hopefully remember a lot of pictures and illustrations, and not a lot of bullet points. I’m something of a frustrated graphic designer. I lack any formal training, but I suppose that I share some of the work style of a real designer—notably intense focus, iterative development, and lots of experimentation.
Developing a highly graphic presentation is the kind of work that relies as much on tool capability as it does on user expertise. But most of all, it demands a highly responsive experience. Nothing kills my design cycle like latency. I have never seen a cloud-based tool for presentations that meets all of my needs, so for the foreseeable future, local PowerPoint will remain my illustration tool of choice.
I find that software development is a little like presentation design. It responds well to intense focus and enjoys a very iterative style. And like graphic design, coding is a discipline that demands instantaneous feedback. Sometimes I write applications in a simple text editor, but when I can, I much prefer the power of a full IDE. Sometimes I think that IntelliJ IDEA is the smartest guy in the room. So for many of the same reasons I prefer local PowerPoint for presentations, so too I prefer a local IDE with few if any external dependencies for software development.
What I’ve discovered is that I don’t want to develop in the cloud; but I do want to use cloud services and probably deploy my application into the cloud. I want a local cloud I can work on offline without any external dependency. (In truth, I really do code on airplanes—indeed some of my best work takes place at 35,000 feet.) Once I’m ready to deploy, I want to migrate my app into the cloud without modifying the underlying code.
Until recently, this was hard to do. But it sounds like Micro Cloud Foundry is just what I have been looking for. More on this topic once I’ve had a chance to dig deeply into it.
