You bet your PaaS it’s open!

Scalr now supports VMware’s open source PaaS, Cloud Foundry!

Platforms-as-a-Service, a.k.a PaaS, have been all the rage in 2011. Does the startup Heroku ring a bell? It should: our friends Adam Wiggins and James Lindenbaum took the tech world by storm with Heroku.

Since then, a number of competing platforms have also grown in popularity (such as the Google App Engine, DotCloud, EngineYard, OpenShift, and Joyent, among others).

And now with Scalr you can easily run and operate your own Cloud Foundry cluster. Simply add the Cloud Foundry role to a farm and launch.

A production-ready Cloud Foundry deployment

Cloud Foundry on Scalr is available in two flavors.

The all-in-one flavor is a role that includes all CF core components but does not scale. This is ideal for test runs, trials, and evaluations. What’s more, it’s cheap to run on a public cloud since it runs on a single server.

The component flavor is composed of three roles, for each of Cloud Foundry’s core components: the router, the DEA, and the CCHM (with nats, cloud_controller, health_manager). Both the router and DEA auto-scale, but the CCHM is limited to a single node.

A load balancer forwards traffic to nodes of a Cloud Foundry cluster

Got you excited? Nerd it up and read more about it here, or you can create your own account and get your hands dirty.

There are some limitations: this hasn’t been integrated into Chef yet (although the CF team is hard at work on preparing cookbooks for it), so this doesn’t work with our Role Builder. However, we pre-made some  images for you on EC2 using Ubuntu 10.04 64bit on the hosted Scalr service, so you don’t have to build them, and can get started in seconds.

What’s next? We don’t have any service bindings yet, but we have full scaling support for MongoDB, Redis, and MySQL, so as soon as we do, managing your CF cluster for your applications will be dead simple.

Complement your Cloud Foundry deployment with scalable, self-managed db services