Category: Platform as a Service

CloudBees Reveals AnyCloud For PaaS Application Deployment in Multiple Environments

This week, PaaS vendor CloudBees announced the availability of AnyCloud, a platform that empowers customers to enjoy applications across a range of IT infrastructures including on-premise data centers and hosted data center environments. Whereas most PaaS platforms require the installation of software within a private cloud environment, AnyCloud enables customers to deploy applications in diverse environments such as Amazon Web Services, other IaaS hosting environments and enterprise data centers. AnyCloud manages the deployment of applications across different environments and thereby allows customers to differentially deploy applications in different hosting environments in order to:

• Comply with regulatory policies specific to a geographic region
• Comply with company policies about which data centers can be used for application deployment
• Minimize data latency and security issues

François Déchery, CloudBees Vice President of International Business Development, explained the significance of AnyCloud by noting: “As we worked with customers around the world, CloudBees was being asked more and more for deployment options across various IT environments and hosted providers – particularly in Europe. We decided to satisfy the demand for flexible deployment options in a very different way than our competition.” AnyCloud supports any JVM-language including Java, Spring, JRuby, Grails, Scala, Groovy and others.

AnyCloud illustrates the emerging co-implication of PaaS platforms within IaaS infrastructures. This week, for example, Nimbula’s IaaS Nimbula Director 2.0 platform revealed support for third party PaaS platforms including the VMware Cloud Foundry PaaS. Current CloudBees customers include Digg, The Gerson Lehman Group, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Netflix, Symantec and Yale University. CloudBees was founded in 2010 by Sacha Labourey, former CTO of JBoss.

Engine Yard Claims Leadership Of PaaS Space With $28 Million In 2011 Revenue

PaaS vendor Engine Yard announced record growth for 2011 marked by $28 million in revenue and over 2000 paying customers. The revenue growth rate of 58% and an over 50% increase in the number of customers in 2011 enabled Engine Yard to claim leadership in the PaaS space. Other highlights for 2011 included the acquisition of Orchestra and the launch of Engine Yard labs, which provides users with the opportunity to examine new features and functionality in a test environment. Engine Yard acquired Orchestra in August 2011 to form the basis of its Orchestra PHP Cloud for deploying and managing PHP based applications. Today, Engine Yard’s Orchestra PHP Cloud runs alongside its Ruby on Rails-based Engine Yard Cloud. Engine Yard’s Orchestra PHP Cloud celebrates a significant release later this month featuring increased configurability through APIs and higher performance due to optimized stack images, as well as superior auto-scaling. San Francisco-based Engine Yard is backed by Benchmark Capital, New Enterprise Associates and Amazon.com.

ActiveState Stackato PaaS Announces Support For OpenStack, Linux KVM and the Citrix XenServer

ActiveState revealed details of the latest version of its Platform as a Service solution, ActiveState Stackato, today. An “infrastructure-agnostic, multilingual private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution,” ActiveState Stackato now supports OpenStack, Linux KVM and the Citrix XenServer. With today’s announcement, customers can use Stackato to deploy applications to either (1) a private, internal cloud that leverages VMware vSphere, OpenStack, Linux KVM or Citrix XenServer, or (2) a public cloud hosted by Amazon Web Services or HP Cloud Services. ActiveState Stackato’s support of OpenStack, Linux KVM and Citrix XenServer further adds to the flexibility it provides developers. The new version of ActivateState Stackato also boasts an enhanced management console featuring superior application lifecyle management and accelerated speeds of Perl deployment. Stackato is a multilingual PaaS that supports development in Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, Perl, Node.js, Scala, and Clojure. ActiveState Stackato is used by 97% of Fortune 1000 companies “to develop, distribute, and manage their software applications.” Enterprise customers include Bank of America, HP, Lockheed Martin and Siemens.

Jaspersoft Targets Platform as a Service Market For Business Intelligence Analytics

In an effort to gain market share in the Platform as a Service cloud computing space, Jaspersoft announced it had reached an agreement with Red Hat to bundle its community edition for free with Red Hat’s PaaS OpenShift. Jaspersoft’s availability within the OpenShift platform is intended to entice developers and administrators to embed Jaspersoft business intelligence analytics into their applications. Developers who progress from the free, community Jaspersoft edition to a subscription version will be able to migrate all of the code used in the community version. Karl Van den Bergh, Jaspersoft’s Vice President of Product and Alliances, noted that Jaspersoft’s integration with Red Hat constitutes the “first of several [partnerships] that demonstrates our leadership in BI for PaaS.” Jaspersoft’s strategic alliance with Red Hat’s OpenShift PaaS platform illustrates an emerging sub-market within the cloud computing space separate from cloud security, namely, business intelligence applications integrated with PaaS or IaaS cloud offerings. Gooddata, for example, offers BI development capabilities within the Amazon Web Services environment. Unconfirmed reports indicate that Jaspersoft is additionally targeting VMware’s Cloud Foundry as a possible seeding ground for its BI software as well as Salesforce.com’s Heroku.

The PaaS market currently features products such as OpenShift (Red Hat), Cloud Foundry (VMware), CloudSwing (OpenLogic), Engine Yard Cloud (Engine Yard), Heroku (Salesforce), Azure (Microsoft), Google App Engine (Google), Cumulogic PaaS (CumuLogic), dotCloud, and Appfog. Although PaaS revenues are currently miniscule in comparison to IaaS, the market is expected to grow rapidly in the next five to ten years from Gartner’s projection of $707.4 million in 2011 PaaS revenues.

Report: Microsoft To Support Linux and Persistent Virtual Machines On Windows Azure

Unconfirmed reports from the All About Microsoft blog by ZDNet’s Mary-Jo Foley suggest that Microsoft is gearing up to support Linux on its Windows Azure cloud platform in 2012. The blog claims that Microsoft will launch a persistent virtual machine on the Azure platform that enables customers to run Windows or Linux “durably,” meaning, without suffering any loss of data due to rebooting on the Azure platform. Support for the persistent virtual machine on Windows Azure will additionally enable customers to host applications using SharePoint and SQL Server. While the conjunction of Linux and Windows might seem unthinkable given Microsoft Corporation’s historical antipathy toward Linux and open-source computing, Linux support on Azure would represent a huge coup for Azure customers that would like the flexibility to run Linux-based instances in the vein of Amazon Web Services. Moreover, Linux support on Azure enables Azure to compete more squarely with VMware. Microsoft reportedly conceded to customer requests for persistent virtual machines because customers demanded the ability to host applications such as SharePoint within a persistent virtual environment.

OpenLogic CloudSwing Joins Rackspace Cloud Tools Program

In late December, OpenLogic announced a partnership with Rackspace whereby its Platform as a Service (PaaS) product CloudSwing would be available on the Rackspace Cloud via its Cloud Tools Program. OpenLogic’s partnership with the Rackspace Cloud Tools program means that Rackspace customers can deploy applications using OpenLogic’s CloudSwing PaaS platform. Moreover, Rackspace customers can track deployment costs for CloudSwing from all of their Rackspace accounts. CloudSwing deployments on the Rackspace cloud can leverage the CloudSwing dashboard to understand performance within their cloud infrastructure. OpenLogic’s disclosure of its participation in the Rackspace Cloud Tools Program comes roughly three weeks after it bundled New Relic into its CloudSwing offering. New Relic provides 360 degree cloud monitoring tools that enable customers to access cloud infrastructure performance data at a level of granularity beyond the server or instance level. New Relic provides user monitoring, server monitoring, application monitoring, and availability monitoring within an integrated SaaS solution.

OpenLogic’s partnership with the Rackspace Cloud Tools Program is set to increase CloudSwing’s distribution by rendering it readily available to all Rackspace customers. OpenLogic CloudSwing brands itself as “industry’s first-ever fully flexible Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud solution” that “offers an entirely customizable array of infrastructure, languages, and technology stacks, giving companies and developers the flexibility they need to choose the best platforms for all their cloud deployments.” CloudSwing currently supports a number of pre-configured technology stacks including Java, Ruby, PHP, and JavaScript with platforms based on Rails, Tomcat, LAMP, node.js, and nginx.