Cloud Foundry, the open source PaaS that's become a major part of IBM's Bluemix offering, is now showing up in an unlikely place: Microsoft Azure.
In a blog post released earlier today, Ning Kuang, senior program manager for Microsoft Azure, provided word of the first public preview of Cloud Foundry on Azure.
Setting up Cloud Foundry instances can be done either manually or with an Azure Resource Manager template. The actual deployment can be done via Cloud Foundry's open source Bosh project, now with Azure support courtesy of Microsoft. Microsoft's plan is to have all the code needed to support Cloud Foundry on Azure submitted upstream "in a few months prior to GA."
When Azure support for Cloud Foundry was originally announced, it went hand-in-hand with announcements for a few other PaaS offerings: Jelastic and Apprenda. Both of those, however, are commercial solutions; Cloud Foundry is an entirely open source effort.
In keeping with Microsoft's ongoing pitch for Azure as a hybrid environment via Azure Service Fabric, the blog post mentions this new functionality in that light, stating it "enables our customers to deploy Cloud Foundry on Azure and extend their workloads from any public or private cloud to Azure."
Likewise, Microsoft claims it is "working to ensure that Azure CPI [Cloud Provider Interface] will in work in a private cloud environment running on Azure Stack and we will have more on that to come in the near future."