Yesterday I came across some great news via Twitter which will have the OpenStack followers happy. Coincidentally, it ties in beautifully with yesterday’s discussion on types of cloud architectures, and ofcourse being Technology Tuesday the vendor love this week falls to the new partnership between VMware and Piston. Between the two of them, there is some exciting news on the open source cloud front.

Poor VMware has been under the gun lately as more and more attention has been focused on OpenStack clouds as a viable alternative to VMware. Personally, I still like the idea of standardization, especially as it relates to Converged Infrastructure platforms like VCE’s vBlock. But now, the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive. The new partnership between VMware and Piston is aimed at building an OpenStack layer to Vmware’s Bosh open source toolchain for Cloud Foundry (the open source PaaS platform). This might have been a response to Citrix’s recent donation of CloudStack to the Apache Software Foundation.

In either case, this now means that VMware will support open APIs. Piston will help by writing an OpenStack layer which will be in the base release of Cloud Foundry (The PaaS engine from VMware). By leveraging Vmware’s Bosh toolchain, it will enable release engineering, deployment and lifecycle management for large scale distributed services.