P.S. Don't Forget About .NET, Java, and Javascript!

Analysis of Job Salary and Demand by Skill from gooroo.io
Sure, to many developers, they aren't as "cutting-edge" as working with Ruby and they aren't as exciting as Python, or Go. By most measures though, .NET, Java and Javascript are still the leaders in terms of number of jobs available and the salaries those jobs command. This means that companies are still hiring like crazy for these skills. That means they are still creating and maintaining applications that use these technologies. This is why it is critically important for anyone creating a platform to run applications to be able to support all 3 of these top-tier languages and the services required by them.

Cloud Foundry, the open source Platform as a Service project, has had great support for Java and Javascript (as well as Ruby, PHP, Python, Go and many other languages) for quite some time with its flexible Buildpack system. A huge hole in Cloud Foundry, however, has been support for .NET applications (and not Mono on Linux, but _real_ .NET application support on Windows based machines).  "Does Cloud Foundry run .NET applications?", is probably one of the top questions I'm asked when I talk about Cloud Foundry.  So there is no question that there is demand for running .NET applications on a platform like Cloud Foundry.  Whenever there is demand and a gap in supply, businesses will step up and fill the gap.

Fairly soon after Cloud Foundry was created, projects like IronFoundry sprang up to provide support for .NET applications in Cloud Foundry.  Since those initial attempts to provide .NET support for Cloud Foundry, many things have changed in the Cloud Foundry environment. The Cloud Foundry APIs were rewritten and the Diego Project revamped the way applications are run in Cloud Foundry. Great changes provide great opportunities and so Pivotal, CenturyLink and the IronFoundry teams got together and decided to make .NET applications into a first class citizens in Cloud Foundry. They have provided the code necessary to do this as additional, open-source repositories that are in the process of being merged into the mainline codebase of Cloud Foundry. You can read more about those efforts at the Pivotal Blog.

This means that we should soon start seeing enterprise distributions of Cloud Foundry that provide consistent support for .NET applications running on Windows servers along with other languages that traditionally run well on Linux based containers.  All on your choice of and portability between private, semi-private, or public Infrastructure as a Service providers.

I, for one, cannot wait. :)

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