Cloud Foundry wants to help your developers to spend more time on code, and less time on middleware. Dekel Tankel – Director of Product Marketing, Cloud Foundry & Pivotal, stopped by to talk with John Furrier – Founder, SiliconANGLE and Jeff Frick – team member of theCUBE. The one takeaway if you didn’t get to catch his interview, agility.

Cloud Foundry is an open platform as a service, providing a choice of clouds, developer frameworks and application services. It was initiated by VMware, and the goal of Cloud Foundry is to make it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications. Cloud Foundry wants you to have more productive developers, plain and simple. Over and over Tankel drove home the message of “more time coding, less time dealing with middlewear.”  And thats a pain point he says that they’ve heard over and over with their clients. The idea of productivity and agility isn’t deeply engrained enough in the DevOps process. Process and platform need to mirror each other in agility, and by agility Cloud Foundry means ability to move your code about the cloud.

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You’ve heard of SaaS (Software as a Service), but Cloud Foundry is PaaS (Platform as a Service). As a PaaS, you get a choice of clouds for deployment, frameworks for development and application services for running your application. Additionally, as an open source project the community is contributing to the development of the service offering.

The play here, in my view, is pretty simple: they want to be your infrastructure component, and by doing so encourage companies to worry less about that part of the equation, and more on the coding part.

The developer process and environment described above is called open path. What open path means is that you can move between the choices of frameworks, services and cloud seamlessly and easily. If it isn’t clear yet, Cloud Foundry runs on top of AWS (Amazon Web Services) or OpenStack. In the new model of a software-defined data center, Cloud Foundry wants to take out any of the middle men between you and your application.

The open system in an open source model is another degree of open we haven’t seen a lot of, so I’ll be interested to see how Cloud Foundry’s open sourced project matures. The barrier to entry is set awfully low, so I wouldn’t necessarily bet against them.