The Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF), which bills itself as the industry standard Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), yesterday unveiled a new certification standard created to assure IT organizations of compatibility between multiple implementations of the open-source Cloud Foundry PaaS.

In what is no small feat, some of the biggest PaaS vendors, including Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Pivotal Software Inc., and IBM have agreed to jump on the bandwagon and certify that their individual Cloud Foundry-based PaaS offerings are built on portable code that won’t lock-in customers.

The Cloud Foundry Foundation said the idea was to ensure portability across the various leading platform-as-a-service offerings. CenturyLink Inc., SAP SE and Swisscomm AG are the other companies which have already earned the Cloud Foundry PaaS certification, which is aimed at advancing hybrid cloud environments by providing a common software layer that abstracts away the underlying infrastructure.

In an interview with InfoWorld, Cloud Foundry CEO Sam Ramji said the main point of the new certification is to guarantee that the various flavors of Cloud Foundry can deploy applications reliably and consistently. “When you have an open source project as permissive as Cloud Foundry is,” Ramji said. “It’s great for proliferation, but there’s no limit to the number of different variants you can create from that same code.”

Most enterprises would probably like to see similar certification efforts being adopted by other open-source projects, but Cloud Foundry is fairly unique in that it’s one of the few that hasn’t seen its code corrupted by proprietary software add-ons from the major vendors.

The new certification guarantees that applications and skills can be ported across any cloud service or on-premise software, and ensures that all certified products from the above list of vendors are built on the same core Cloud Foundry code. Vendors will be required to re-certify their products on an annual basis, the foundation added.

As enterprises build out cloud applications, it’s likely that this kind of certification effort could gain momentum.

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