Iron Foundry is an open source project that extends Cloud Foundry™ to the .NET ecosystem by providing services, installers, and developer tools.
Iron Foundry is a fork of Cloud Foundry with .NET support. The Iron Foundry team is working with the Cloud Foundry community to enable .NET with changes in the core code base and developer tools. While we are collaborating closely with the Cloud Foundry team to ensure that Iron Foundry stays in synch with the core Cloud Foundry offering, as of today we are a stand-alone fork while Pivotal Initiative decides its direction for .NET support in Cloud Foundry.
Developers can run their own instances of Iron Foundry in-house or with any service provider who supports it, finally giving them a truly open, interoperable .NET PaaS solution that can be run inside and outside the firewall. Because you can run your own instances of Iron Foundry, it’s easy to leverage it for a full dev, test/ QA, and staging environment before pushing to production. Operations teams now have the freedom to choose among a variety of service providers providing the same PaaS used in their development environments, enabling them to pick the one that meets their specific needs in areas such as security, compliance, availability, location, etc.
There are multiple projects that make up the Iron Foundry offering:
Cloud Foundry Core Integration: A fork of the Cloud Foundry (VCAP) code base that modifies the code to support the ASP.NET framework. This code will be submitted back to the main project long term.
Cloud Foundry Explorer for Windows: This is the Windows -based cloud foundry explorer which we’ve open sourced today. It will held in the Iron Foundry repository.
Cloud Foundry Visual Studio Add-in: The Windows-based Cloud Foundry visual studio add-in that is open sourced and held in the Iron Foundry repository.
Cloud Foundry Windows DEA: .NET DEA for enabling and managing application on windows with IIS inside the cloud foundry environment.
Cloud Foundry Windows VMC: The future replacement for the Ruby VMC on Windows to enable a more supportable environment for developers on Windows. This code is live on Iron Foundry and we encourage beta testers to use it.
At Tier 3, we’ve been big supporters of Cloud Foundry—the Pivotal Initiative-led, open-source PaaS framework—from the beginning. That said, we’re a .NET shop and many of our customers’ most critical applications are .NET-based. So today we’ve decided to contribute Iron Foundry, our own .NET fork of Cloud Foundry, back to the community as an open-source project. (This project includes both the primary framework as well as both a Windows version of Cloud Foundry Explorer and a Visual Studio Plugin for Cloud Foundry.)
You have two choices for leveraging Iron Foundry immediately. First, you can take advantage of the “try it now” test bed environment available here on IronFoundry.org consisting of web and database instances per developer. 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.
You can also run Iron Foundry in your own environment – simply download the code from GitHub under the Apache 2 license.
Just like with Cloud Foundry, contributors are encouraged to follow the best practice of forking the code on GitHub, work on improvements and then submit a pull request. Tier 3 will lead as project maintainers; pull requests can be submitted to the project maintainers to review and evaluate the proposed changes.
You can learn more about Cloud Foundry by going to www.cloudfoundry.org. There you will see FAQ, Forums, and a awesome community dedicated to helping each other out.
Iron Foundry is an open source project and not a service provider. We believe companies already offering a .NET PaaS solution in the end will work to integrate Iron Foundry into their system and enhance their offering for the developer community.