CenturyLink embraces Bosh software support from Tier3 acquisition, aims for a better piece of the PaaS pie owned by Amazon, Microsoft, Google.

CenturyLink, a telco cloud service supplier, is capitalizing on its acquisition of Tier3 to higher compete with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google within the race to draw developers. Developer activity tends to provide repeat cloud business. Some would even say vendors must attract developers or die.

EngineYard, Heroku, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google have already demonstrated their chops in platform-as-a-service. Now CenturyLink is making it easy to launch a version of the Cloud Foundry developer’s platform on its CenturyLink Cloud.

CenturyLink now supports Bosh, open-source software that makes it simpler to deploy Cloud Foundry, PaaS sponsored by VMware. Bosh is another open-source project that grew out of the unique Cloud Foundry effort; it’s sponsored by Pivotal, the spinoff from VMware and EMC. Tier3 supported Cloud Foundry implementation using Bosh on its provisioning site before it was acquired by CenturyLink in November; now CenturyLink is doing the identical thing. It may provide a duplicate of the Bosh command line, familiar to its users, in its Micro-Bosh server, which in turn will deploy a ready-to-go version of Cloud Foundry. One restriction: the Micro-Bosh server works only with Ubuntu Linux.

[Red Hat is answering Cloud Foundry’s challenge. Learn more: Red Hat Takes On VMware For PaaS Crown.]

Bosh agents can exit to the Cloud Foundry project site and grab components that may be configured together. Once assembled, the construction platform may be deployed by Bosh to Amazon Web Services’ EC2, an OpenStack cloud, or a VMware vCloud or vSphere environment, said Jared Wray, former CTO of Tier3 and now CTO of CenturyLink’s cloud unit.

Wray started Iron Foundry, an effort within Cloud Foundry to bring Microsoft’s .Net technologies into the open-source project. It initially considering open source languages, resembling Ruby and PHP. Wray and Tier3 are considered as having the developer insights needed for a successful Cloud Foundry deployment. Support for Bosh in CenturyLink Cloud is in beta, with full support to follow later this year.

Iron Foundry became the second one largest project (apart from Cloud Foundry itself) because the PaaS software was developed. Cloud Foundry “remains a tender product. But due to our roots around Cloud Foundry, a considerable number of customers see us as experts in implementing it,” Wray said in an interview.

There isn’t any charge to apply the beta version of Micro-Bosh on CenturyLink Cloud. Wray said its use will result in more cloud applications and sure more workload deployments on CenturyLink.

CenturyLink charges 11 cents per hour for a virtual server with a CPU with as much as 2 GHz of processing power and as much as 128 GB of RAM; disk storage and networking are extra.

Charles Babcock is an editor-at-large for InformationWeek, having joined the publication in 2003. He’s the previous editor-in-chief of Digital News, former software editor of Computerworld, and previous technology editor of Interactive Week.

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