I recently attended a VMWare webinar on their open source PaaS called CloudFoundry. Very impressive, but I could not understand a single one. Their rivals, such as Heroku and Azure, support the concept of background asynchronous workers in addition to synchronizing web services / applications. Is there an equivalent in CloudFoundry?
There is currently no official support for workers. However, you can run a working class application, but you need to bind the http port that CF assigns.
CF will support non-web applications in the future.
Cloud Foundry recently (May 2012) added support for background workers and "stand-alone" applications. From my blog: