VMWare recently announced Cloud Foundry , a Platform as a Service with a decidedly new-school bent: You'll be able to sign up and tap into running database services like MySQL and MongoDB and login and write code directly to a Spring or Rails environment, much like Engine Yard or Heroku.  Cloud Foundry provides a platform for building, deploying, and running cloud apps using Spring for Java developers, Rails and Sinatra for Ruby developers, Node.js and other JVM frameworks including Grails.Cloud Foundry is available online for free under the Apache 2.0 license, and it will be governed in a manner similar to the Spring framework. 

Most interesting aspect of cloud Foundry announcement is Cloud Foundry Micro Cloud. From their own website: “Micro Cloud is a single developer instance of Cloud Foundry. It provides developers with a personal PaaS that runs on their desktop. Micro Cloud is provided as a downloadable software image for VMware Fusion or VMware Player, as well a hosted image on selected cloud partners.” This is big in so many ways. Prior to the Micro Cloud concept, developers had to deploy a small private cloud (or spin up a paid instance from a public cloud provider like Amazon) in order to test their code. The Micro Cloud will now allow developers to deploy a developer instance on their own workstations (and/or laptops) for development and testing. Think of this as a cloud IDE. The Micro Cloud will save time and money in the development process.

Micro Cloud is VMware's solution for developers wanting to build applications for Cloud Foundry. Targeted for release during the summer, Micro Cloud is a small development version of Cloud Foundry designed to run on a developer’s desktop or in a test lab. The software will contain all of the APIs, environments and frameworks present in the full-sized Cloud Foundry installation, but will be small enough to run on a single machine for testing purposes.