Tier 3 Contributes .NET Framework Support for Cloud Foundry™ Platform as a Service to the Open Source Community

BELLEVUE, Wash., Dec. 13, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Tier 3, Inc., the enterprise cloud platform provider, today announced that it has contributed to the open source community a .NET Framework implementation of the Cloud Foundry™ Open Platform as a Service (Paas).  Named Iron Foundry, this contribution gives the industry's fastest growing open source PaaS an implementation based on the popular development framework, .NET.

Tier 3's Iron Foundry contribution consists of the three key components required for developers to quickly leverage the open source project for their own PaaS implementation or to leverage Iron Foundry to deploy applications to the cloud immediately.  In addition to a core .NET Framework fork of Cloud Foundry, which Tier 3 is committing to keep it in sync with the main Cloud Foundry branch, developers can also access IronFoundry.org for both a Windows version of Cloud Foundry Explorer as well as a Visual Studio Plugin for Cloud Foundry. Tier 3 will also make the core code available on GitHub under an Apache 2.0 license.

"At Tier 3, we believe that PaaS is so universal and so foundational to the adoption of cloud for web applications that it should be an open source framework," said Jared Wray, chief technology officer, Tier 3. "As enterprises accelerate the deployment of their mission-critical applications to the cloud, the need for a .NET-based Cloud Foundry PaaS in the marketplace was acute.  As fans of the open source nature of Cloud Foundry ― and as a .NET based-cloud platform ourselves — we were excited to take on this opportunity to support the enterprise developer and open source communities and to foster innovation for the cloud."

"Tier3's contribution of .NET Framework support is another powerful example of the open Cloud Foundry ecosystem in action," said Jerry Chen, vice president of cloud and application services at VMware.  "The availability of the .NET Framework on Cloud Foundry will greatly expand .NET developers' ability to deploy their applications across a wide variety of clouds."

In addition to the core Iron Foundry code project, Tier 3 is also committing substantial support to the Iron Foundry community to help contributors and implementers.  To ensure that contributors have access to engineering and technical support, Tier 3 is committing time from Tier 3's own expert engineers via the IronFoundry.org community forums.  Additionally, to accelerate adoption, Tier 3 is donating a full test bed environment via a "try it now" feature on IronFoundry.org consisting of one web and one database instances per developer for 90 days.  The test bed is powered by Tier 3's enterprise-class cloud platform and requires only email address, password, and acceptance of the Tier 3 PaaS EULA.

Additional Resources

• IronFoundry.org
• Iron Foundry code and wiki on GitHub
• Tier 3 Blog: Say Hello to Iron Foundry

About Tier 3
Tier 3 helps large and mid-size enterprises bring applications and services to the cloud.  The Bellevue, Wash.-based company provides an enterprise-grade virtual private cloud, enhanced by a framework-agnostic cloud orchestration layer to enable IT automation and agility. Architected for security, risk mitigation and high availability ― with 99.999% SLA at all layers and disaster recovery in every deployment ― Tier 3 is optimized for production environments and mission-critical applications. Tier 3's innovative infrastructure delivers superior performance and resource optimization while expert support provides a virtual extension of in-house IT staff. For more information, visit www.tier3.com.

VMware and Cloud Foundry are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions.

SOURCE Tier 3, Inc.