EMC Turns Open Source Sensei, Stages First Cloud Foundry "Dojo"

HOPKINTON, Mass., March 19, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Having reached the rank of second-degree black belt in Shukokai Karate, I'm acutely aware that martial arts excellence requires an all-in commitment by students to master strength, flexibility, discipline and harmony across both body and mind. Like any worthwhile training, students benefit greatly from a teacher, a sensei, to impart experience, skill and wisdom. The same holds true in software and application development.  Pupils learn from masters and advance to create new innovations through the art of code writing. It is through this timeless method that EMC is helping develop the next generation of coding black belts and sensei through the opening of the first Cloud Foundry "Dojo." For the uninitiated, dojo means "the place of the way" and is a word commonly used to describe a martial arts training facility.

EMC has a strong interest and equally strong investment in hybrid cloud technology, as we believe it will play a huge role in the end state for IT systems in the not-too-distant future. But in order for this reality to take shape, an ecosystem of open APIs and frameworks must be nurtured to overcome one of the biggest hybrid cloud challenges - making content and applications portable.

EMC believes that Cloud Foundry represents the industry's best and most mature cloud abstraction technology, which is the reason we've become a founding member of the Cloud Foundry Foundation and why we're moving ahead aggressively to open the first Cloud Foundry Dojo since the Foundation's inception. The EMC Cambridge Cloud Foundry Dojo is expected to be fully online this summer.  It's a strategic move by EMC as we look to become a major contributor to the open source community to help accelerate the industry movement to a truly portable cloud ecosystem.

Why Cloud Foundry, why now? 
Cloud has arguably had one of the most significant impacts on IT and mobile computing inside of a very short time period. Like many game-changing technologies, however, there are early iterations and best practices that tend to dominate, sometimes lingering long after their shelf life has expired. Closed cloud frameworks and APIs (ironically in most "public clouds") are a perfect example as they lock content and applications into a single cloud model. Open source platforms like Cloud Foundry hold the key.

While no one expects there to be a uniform architecture for all clouds, there have to be new technologies that allow for application and content portability from cloud-to-cloud. To facilitate this, applications will be deployed thru a cloud foundry.  As one of the leading and fastest-growing cloud native application platforms, we believe Cloud Foundry is the best choice for IT.

With an ecosystem built around Cloud Foundry, applications can be developed once and utilize the infrastructure services of a range of public and private clouds without tight coupling. This will drive new levels of flexibility and choice for customers and create innovation through competition.

Committer status in as little as 6 weeks?
The concept of the Cloud Foundry Dojo is about rapid learning and development of applications through "pair programming" that puts software coders shoulder-to-shoulder with Cloud Foundry gurus for 6-12 week open source projects designed to breed qualified Cloud Foundry engineers with "committer" status. It is based on a uniquely West Coast-oriented agile development program that originated in the coding Dojo of Pivotal Labs, which EMC acquired in 2012 and is now part of EMC Federation company Pivotal Software, Inc. As Pivotal has proven in hundreds of instances with its developer customers, the Dojo model is an excellent vehicle where deep expertise can be established to anchor the technical ecosystem.

The EMC Dojo will be co-located in the same Kendall Square building in Cambridge that currently houses EMC's top technologists who are working on open systems software (OpenStack, Docker, etc.) as well as advanced technologies such as flash and hybrid cloud. The area is also soaked with a network of engineering talent in nearby MIT, Microsoft NERD and Pivotal Labs, where innovation and modern application development is taking place.

Today the Cloud Foundry Foundation is looking for its member companies to develop a strong Dojo model to get a critical mass of software coders developing applications on Cloud Foundry. EMC is proud to be the first company to open a Dojo in partnership with the independent Cloud Foundry Foundation.

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SOURCE EMC Corporation

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