Cloud-Foundations.org was founded by Richard Gooch and Camilo Viecco in September 2019. Prior to this they worked together in the Cloud Platform Engineering (CPE) team at Symantec Inc. Although having moved on to different opportunities, they continue to collaborate on the Open Source technologies they initiated at Symantec.
We believe in choice. Each of the major components under the Cloud Foundations umbrella can be used effectively without adopting the other components (although adopting more components yields an improved, integrated experience as the whole is greater than the sum of the parts).
We like simplicity and minimalism. We prefer architectures which are easy to understand and technology that is easy to configure, deploy and maintain. We strive to build safe and sensible defaults rather than forcing you to walk through and understand every esoteric option (we know you just want to deploy, enjoy and move on).
We like balanced solutions that are practical and effective rather than theoretical or incomplete. While it may sound good to say “everything is 5 nines reliable”, for some components 2 nines would be acceptable and 3 nines would be great “no-one would care”. This does not mean we write software of low quality, rather that we focus on where reliability is most needed; a system in the critical path of a Production service should be at least 4 nines reliable whereas 3 nines is likely fine for a build pipeline. This focus is on how to deal with environmental failures (i.e. hardware or network failures), as the software by itself is typically 4 nines reliable.
We seek to leverage existing standards and protocols where appropriate, so that our technologies may interoperate with the wider Open Source ecosystem.
We welcome new members and contributors who share the vision.
We want to lower the bar for running a secure, reliable and scalable computing platform. This can range from building a Private Cloud from the ground up, through a Hybrid/Poly Cloud platform providing a base layer common across Private and Public Clouds to a pure Public Cloud environment where we help you fill in the gaps left by the cloud provider.
We believe that it is possible to run a Private Cloud that is cost competitive with Public Cloud offerings, provided there is discipline, good management and good technology. We are here to bring you the foundational technologies to help you. We also have opinions on the other dimensions, but here we focus on the technology dimension.
We will continue to enhance the technologies that we have developed and as we identify opportunities to solve foundational problems inadequately addressed within the Open Source world, we will develop new technologies. These may come in the form of tools, applications or support libraries.
We are not trying to build the foundations of a Public Cloud, which is a more complex and costly endeavour, requiring much more investment to deliver even a basic product offering. Nor do we intend to re-implement the many good Open Source technologies that already exist and do a fine job. So, don’t expect us to re-implement container orchestration, databases, distributed file-systems and so on. Our focus is the foundations on which these technologies lie.