Why Iron.io Joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation
As of today, Iron.io formally joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation, the community behind the rapidly growing open source Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). With this exciting news, I wanted to take a quick moment to reflect on what brought us here, and where we see ourselves moving towards.
As a growing company in a fast paced ecosystem, it is our goal to align ourselves closely with big picture movements that reflect the landscape today, as well as where we are heading. As more and more companies plan or begin the process of transforming into a software company in some capacity, developer empowerment has become a key tenet to the inner workings of these organizations. At the heart of this empowerment in many cases is the modern PaaS, which has evolved from a quick way to deploy apps, to being the foundation for large scale systems.
As these systems grow their footprint, there often comes a need for further domain specificity at the service layer to handle the varying use cases. Iron.io has always found a natural fit with PaaS implementations as a best-of-breed service provider. Our message queueing and job processing services, IronMQ and IronWorker, have become critical components for many organizations, ranging from high growth startups such as Untappd to large Enterprises such as Turner Broadcasting.
Alongside the evolution of cloud technologies in recent years, we’ve also seen a shift in practice as more and more companies are taking an architecture-first approach to application development. For the first time ever – developers, systems administrators, and business owners are becoming aligned early on with the goal of moving quickly and effectively, while avoiding the headaches of technical debt, complex integrations, and vendor lock-in. This is a movement that Iron.io and the members of the Cloud Foundry community have been at the forefront of, transforming the way companies power their IT operations.
We have watched Cloud Foundry mature since its inception to the strong open source community it is today. The concept of being “cloud native” is something we at Iron.io believe in as well, and have promoted within our company since day one. In joining the Foundation, we aim to bring our domain expertise to the Cloud Foundry community to help complete the “platform story” for many organizations with Lambda-like services across public, private, and hybrid clouds.
From a technical perspective, this means we’ll be working to ensure a seamless integration between our services and the underlying platform, so that developers using Cloud Foundry can quickly leverage the Iron.io API for solutions such as scheduled jobs, batch processing, transaction processing, ETL pipelines, and more. We’ll be working alongside our partners in the community to make customer deployments simple for the operators, and friendly for the developers. We’re excited to be part of the empowerment that cloud native technologies brings to a wide range of industries.
On a final note, for those attending the Cloud Foundry Summit in Berlin, I’ll be on hand to answer any questions you may have about Iron.io, where we fit with Cloud Foundry, and how to get started. Find me there or on Twitter @fortyfivan.
