I've been spending a good amount of my time in the evenings this week reading through the Cloud Foundry source code (available on github). I'll admit that I've caught the bug... the team at VMware has done a fantastic job of keeping the foundational system as simple as possible. I say that both from a user's perspective, and from looking through the internals of the code itself. To me, this is exactly the right way to solve a problem. Start with a simple solution to a generalized use case, and then make it work. From there, it's a matter of refinement and feature extension.
What I think is most powerful about the platform's approach, is that it is fundamentally based on the idea that the app runtime environment, supporting service and platform provider options can (and should) grow independantly. It's only been a few days, and the community as already provided the Cloud Foundry team with pull requests to add in JRuby and Erlang support. I have to imagine that new service support will quickly follow as well.
In terms of cloud providers, VMware made the right decision to host an instance of the platform in their own environment (which, combined with their new responsibility to host Mozy for parent EMC, is another topic altogether), but is fully expecting to see other providers offer differentiated versions of the platform. As Ezra Zygmuntowicz (@ezmobius) put it, "(VMware) want(s) this to be the kernel for the cloud, not only our cloud". Unlike vCloud, the openness of Cloud Foundry is what will make it more palatable to cloud providers, because it gives them numerous opportunities to establish differentiated solutions and offerings around the base platform.
Will VMware be abe to avoid some of the governance and political issues that Rackspace / OpenStack have run into? Rackspace and OpenStack appear to have gotten through that little rough spot, but I certainly hope that VMware learned from their experience.
For a quick overview of the internals, take a look at @igrigorik's post on the Cloud Foundry architecture. I also found this presentation (shared by Dave McCrory - @mccroy) targeting developers to be quite useful:
Disclosure: I work for a cloud platform provider, but the views in this post are mine alone. They do not reflect those of my employer.
