The central theme of the Cloud Foundry Summit, held this week in Santa Clara, California, was multi-cloud, a theme reinforced in CEO Sam Ramji's keynote.

During the keynote Ramji said that all of Cloud Foundry releases support AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, VMware vSphere, OpenStack of various flavors, SoftLayer, and RackHD. “This is a really big deal because it simplifies the experience for developers. One consistent developer experience on a platform across all these different infrastructures.”

It’s abundantly clear that there will never be one cloud; there are going to be multiple clouds offered by multiple providers. And customers aren't going to choose any one cloud and stick to it; they will use whatever fits their need move accordingly. That means they need the capability to move their applications among clouds.

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Ramji told me in an interview, “Cloud Foundry is able to easily support application workloads across any cloud. Giving organizations the ability to choose the cloud that best meets their business requirements, and offer the ability to change over time as their needs change. The benefit of Cloud Foundry is that we have solved the challenges associated with running across multiple clouds — giving organizations true portability and flexibility.”

When I asked about how Cloud Foundry ensures support for multi-cloud, Ramji told me, “Cloud Foundry provides portability for apps. This means that as a developer I have the same, consistent experience developing and deploying apps, regardless of the underlying infrastructure, be it public or private cloud. Cloud Foundry also offers a consistent operational experience, giving ops teams the ability to be responsive and efficiently manage apps at scale. With the Cloud Provider Interface (CPI), Cloud Foundry runs on top of all of the major cloud providers, both public and private, but still provides portability and flexibility irrespective of the underlying infrastructure.”

In his keynote, Ramji also put some numbers around the growth of the Cloud Foundry community. He said that there were over 2,300 patches, over 2,100 contributors with more than 130 core committers, which helped in more than 25 releases in the last year. Ramji attributed this success to the open source community around Cloud Foundry, calling it a positive sum game.

In addition, Cloud Foundry started a Certified PaaS Program that encourages providers to use the same Cloud Foundry code so that users get a consistent experience. They also announced two new certified partners: Atos Cloud Foundry and GE Predix.