Cloud Foundry is an open source, multi-cloud application platform as a service (PaaS) governed by the Cloud Foundry Foundation, a 501(c)(6) organization.

The software was originally developed by VMware, transferred to Pivotal Software (a joint venture by EMC, VMware and General Electric), who then transferred the software to the Cloud Foundry Foundation upon its inception in 2015.

Originally conceived in 2009, Cloud Foundry was designed and developed by a small team at VMware led by Derek Collison and was originally called Project B29. At the time, a different PaaS project written in Java for Amazon EC2 used the name Cloud Foundry. It was founded by Chris Richardson in 2008 and acquired by SpringSource in 2009, the same year VMware acquired SpringSource. The current project is unrelated to the project under SpringSource, but the name was adopted when the original SpringSource project ended.

The announcement of Cloud Foundry took place in April 2011. A year later, in April 2012, BOSH, an open source tool chain for release engineering, deployment, and life-cycle management of large scale distributed services, was publicly launched. In April 2013, Pivotal was created from EMC and VMware, to market assets including Cloud Foundry, RabbitMQ and Spring.

By February 2014, it was announced that there would be an open governance foundation established with seven Platinum members and two Gold members. In May 2014, there was an announcement of expanded membership with the addition of eight new companies. By December 2014, the membership had increased to 40.

In January 2015, the Cloud Foundry Foundation was created as an independent not-for-profit 501(c)(6) Linux Foundation Collaborative Project.

Following the creation of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, the Cloud Foundry software (source code and all associated trademarks) was transferred to be held by the open source software foundation. It is primarily written in Ruby, Go and Java.

As of February 2019, the Foundation had 65 members.