Just announced at VMworld 2010 is the "Cloud Application Platform" layer in the new focus for VMware. This layer covers the Spring Source functionality, Hyperic monitoring solution and the new vFabric solution. The focus of this is around the New Applications that you develop or bring into the business.

The Spring framework and the Hyperic are fairly well known on the web. As such I'm not going to take much time on this. The key in this is that this layer is all about the primitives available to developers in an easy to use and reasonable standardized way. Development speed now is extremely important even more so than in the past. Part of what drives this is the popularity of the scripting/interpreted style languages. One reason is the speed of development. The other is the wide variety of libraries/APIs that are easy to use to do what is needed in the application.

The vFabric solution from VMware at its core is going to be a framework including monitoring interfaces of Cloud Friendly primitives. This API will help the development of those new applications to be Cloud ready. At this time it is broken into two different groups of services.

Spring Frameworks & Tools will include the following primitives:

  • Rich Web interfaces
  • Integration Services
  • Batch processing
  • Data Access
  • Social Media (not just Facebook/Twitter)
  • Cloud APIs


Some of the Common System Services:

  • Application Management & Monitoring (Hyperic)
  • Data Management (GemFire for non-lasting data)
  • Messaging (RabbitMQ)
  • Dynamic Load Balancing
  • Web Server (tc Server)


One key thing is these are for programming a new application which is Cloud ready and friendly. Not just a VMware Cloud. Any cloud that offers a reasonable amount of functionality via APIs should be able to run these frameworks. The vFabric solution is being developed to work with the private Cloud, vmForce and development is ongoing with Google to allow vFabric applications in the Google App Engine.

The last piece of of this is that one of the design goals is to have vFabric work with Java, Ruby and other languages. This should not be limited to just one language.

vFabric offers a strong direction to improve development functionality for companies and allow IT to spend less time provisioning everything. Instead just deliver a common platform and manage the apps, not the infrastructure.