First experiment with Cloud Foundry

I’m at a Cloud Foundry conference today. Cloud Foundry is an open source “cloud” platform as a service (PaaS).

I decided to dive in and try to deploy the server we developed at GiveCamp last week for the ‘Big Brothers and Big Sisters’ charity project. I started by mavenizing the project, so I had a war to deploy.

Then, I created a free Cloud Foundry account, installed their ‘vmc’ command line tool and ran the ‘vmc push’ command to deploy my way to the cloud. And it worked straight off! Don’t you just love it when tools just work?

Our webservice is now running on a remote server that can be accessed by the iPhone and Android apps the team is developing. We still have some database work to complete, but this feels like a nice step forward.

In the mean time, I am now officially a Cloud Foundry fan…

Tags: charity, cloud, cloudfoundry, givecamp