BOSH is a management/deployment tool for large Cloud Foundry implementations. It was just open sourced by VMware today. Mark Lucovsky, presenting at the Cloud Foundry anniversary event in Palo Alto today, described BOSH as “open source tool-chain for release engineering, deployment and lifecyle management large scale distributed services.”

According to Lucovsky, VMware is using BOSH for its own 500+ virtual machine Cloud Foundry cluster. He also says it’s infrastructure-as-a-service neutral, meaning it can be used with multiple public or private cloud infrastructures. However, support for Amazon Web Services is not ready yet.

VMware says that they want to integrate BOSH with configuration management tools like Puppet and Chef.

BOSH, like Cloud Foundry itself, has a command line interface. A command line interface is a must-have for DevOps needs doing extensive deploys. However, it brings to mind one thing I was expecting today that didn’t happen: a GUI for the basic Cloud Foundry platform. That gives companies like AppFog an additional way to differentiate on user interface.

But BOSH is for the underlying layer – the sort of thing that AppFog would use to deploy and manage its own clusters. AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson has told me that AppFog plans to eventually offer its own private PaaS offering based on Cloud Foundry, and the the lack of a GUI is an opportunity in BOSH for AppFog to create some new tools based on BOSH as well.

Disclosure: VMware paid for my travel and accomodations to attend the Cloud Foundry event.