At the Cloud Foundry Summit in Boston, the team behind the U.S. government’s cloud.gov application platform announced that it is now a certified Cloud Foundry platform that is guaranteed to be compatible with other certified providers like Huawei, IBM, Pivotal, SAP and — also starting today — Suse. With this, cloud.gov becomes the first government agency to become Cloud Foundry certified.
The point behind the certification is to ensure that all of the various platforms that support Cloud Foundry are compatible with each other. In the government context, this means that agencies can easily move their workloads between clouds (assuming they have all the necessary government certifications in place). But what’s maybe even more important is that it also ensures skills portability, which should make hiring and finding contractors easier for these agencies. Given that the open source Cloud Foundry project has seen quite a bit of adoption in the private sector, with half of the Fortune 500 companies using it, that’s often an important factor for deciding which platform to built on.
From the outset, cloud.gov, which was launched by the General Services Administration’s 18F office to improve the U.S. government’s public-facing websites and applications, was built on top of Cloud Foundry. Similar agencies in Australia and the U.K. have made the same decision to standardize on the Cloud Foundry platform. Cloud Foundry launched its certification program a few years ago and last year, it also added another program for certifying the skills of individual developers.
To be able to run government workloads, a cloud platform has to offer a certain set of security requirements. As Cloud Foundry Foundation CTO Chip Childers told me, the work 18F did to get the FedRAMP authorization for cloud.gov helped bring better controls to the upstream project, too, and he stressed that all of the governments that have adopted the platform have contributed to the overall project.
