PaaS vendor AppFog announced that it joined the OpenStack community and made commitments to deeper levels of integration between its PaaS platform and OpenStack. AppFog promises to bring an “open PaaS offering to the OpenStack Community” that allows the AppFog PaaS platform to be integrated with and deployed on top of OpenStack installations from different vendors. AppFog CEO Lucas Carlsonwill characterized the company’s decision to join OpenStack as “bringing PaaS as a first class citizen to OpenStack.” AppFog joins lofty company in the club of PaaS vendors that have officially joined OpenStack with Red Hat, purveyor of the PaaS OpenShift, which it recently open-sourced under an Apache License 2. CumuLogic PaaS and CloudBees represent additional PaaS vendors that are part of the OpenStack community.
AppFog also revealed its decision to participate in Rackspace’s Next Generation program as a vendor that will integrate with Rackspace’s beta deployment of OpenStack. AppFog PaaS supports PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, Node.js and Perl. In addition to the multi-lingual PaaS AppFog, the company delivers PHP Fog, a niche PaaS dedicated to PHP. AppFog supports and contributes code to VMware’s open source project Cloud Foundry, meaning AppFog supports all of the languages and databases supported by Cloud Foundry. Tuesday’s announcement was particularly notable for its criticism of “massive cloud services vendors [that] seem to focus on squashing innovation, oppressing developers and keeping prices high in an effort to own the cloud” in an apparent swipe at Amazon Web Services. AppFog CEO Lucas Carlsonwill rendered his criticism of Amazon Web Services more explicit in an interview with GigaOM.
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