Interesting news about Cloud Foundry and Iron Foundry

[Brian Button]

Hi, everyone,

This group has been pretty quiet for a while, so I thought I'd start a new topic for discussion.

First of all, I'm Brian Button. I've recently started at CenturyLink Cloud as the Product Manager for the Application Services Team. My team is responsible for building all the applications that run on top of the CenturyLink Cloud. But that's enough of an introduction of me. On to the more important things for this group!

I'm really excited about my new role also as one of the leaders of the Iron Foundry project, and as such, I plan on being around this group as much as I can to answer questions, discuss issues people are having, talk about what might be coming in the future for Iron Foundry, and anything else you want to chat about. Growing the community of people involved with the Iron Foundry project is very important to me personally, so please feel free to reach out to me at any time. Community is obviously a critical part of any open source project, and I'd very much like to help ours grow. Most of the core group of contributors to this project is still around, but that doesn't mean that there still isn't plenty of room for more. If you'd like to contribute in any way, step right up and post about it here, fork the repo and make a pull request, or do whatever else it takes to get involved. 

There have been a couple of really interesting and exciting things that have happened to the Cloud Foundry and Iron Foundry communities over the past week, and I'd like to share them in case any of you missed the announcements. First of all, Pivotal spun off Cloud Foundry into a larger foundation, backed by some of the cloud heavyweights in the industry. You can see an announcement of that here. This positions Cloud Foundry as the dominant open source PaaS platform, which obviously bodes well for our project.

Next in the stream of news coming out is that Iron Foundry has been accepted into the Cloud Foundry incubation process, which allows us to be integrated even more tightly into their planning and release processes. You can read more about this at the on the ironfoundry.org site. Since this announcement, there have been quite a few tweets and comments in various forums about how excited people are about this project moving forward into a closer integration with Cloud Foundry. There are a lot of individuals and enterprises out there who want to move to the cloud and who are using .Net, so we represent their path.

From an operational view, moving into the incubation program will have no effect on this project. We, as its community, still own the repos, own the code, and own our own road map. What it does is to allow us to become part of the greater release process (once we graduate to being a top level project) and to give the greater Cloud Foundry community greater insight into who we are and what we're building together. 

Thanks to everyone for reading this. I look forward to meeting everyone involved with this community...

bab