Public cloud provider Tier 3 released Iron Foundry, an open distribution of VMware’s Cloud Foundry. The solution makes the latest available to the very large demographic of developers working on .NET applications, adding one of the more widely used frameworks to the existing list of supported platforms. Among those are Spring for Java, Nod.js, Sinatra for Ruby and Rails.

“Bellevue, Wash.-based Tier 3 Inc. is making available an open-source.Net Framework implementation of the Cloud Foundry platform. The new offering, known as Iron Foundry, is available on GitHub under an Apache 2.0 license. It’s a fork of Cloud Foundry with ASP.Net support.”

Tier 3 extended its contribution to VMware’s open PaaS by adding a Windows version of Cloud Foundry Explorer and a Visual Studio plugin to the mix.

Iron Foundry’s introduction of .NET support in particular underscores VMware’s efforts to draw attention to Cloud Foundry. It’s one of the more widely used frameworks so it should appeal to a broad range of new prospective customers that want to run their apps on the cloud; and this extends to a deeper level, as Alex Williams pointed out on ServicesANGLE.  Cloud Foundry can now be used to lure users away from Azure.

Evans Data has been keeping score, and Tier 3’s new code is deemed to give VMware another boost on its next list. A study of developers leveraging PaaS solutions the research firm conduced found that Cloud Foundry is ranked as the best overall platform-as-a-service among the 14 offerings included in the study. It appealed to both private and public cloud users.

As the first open source PaaS, Cloud Foundry is rapidly building up an ecosystem in addition to its customer base. ActiveState was the first company to base its offering wholly on it, and it too is expanding with new updates and features.