'Net Features : PaaS

Deploy Your Apps in the Rackspace Cloud

Michael Garrity — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Cloud computing has provided app developers numerous new opportunities for deploying their creations and growing their audience.

AppFog is a multi-language Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) built for the deployment and management of cloud-based applications; basically, it provides a direct avenue for developers to publish their work in the cloud. It is an infrastructure agnostic service that provides solutions for Java, .NET, node.js, Python, PHP, MySQL, MongoDB, Postgres, and Ruby, among others, so it’s got something for almost every type of developer.

A reliable, scalable, and fast platform for both mobile and Web applications, AppFog currently deploys over 60,000 apps in the cloud that are used by tens of thousands of developers across the world.

Recently, the company announced a major partnership with cloud computing aristocracy. AppFog will begin collaborating with Rackspace so that its customers can deploy applications to the open Rackspace Cloud, which is powered by the company’s OpenStack operating system.

The AppFog solution is going to be available through the brand new Rackspace Cloud Tools Marketplace, a comprehensive catalog of third-party applications designed to be used in the Rackspace Cloud.

Now, AppFog customers can develop and deploy their apps to the Rackspace Cloud in a simple, efficient, and cost effective way. They’ll receive 2GB of free RAM when they create an account, and the service will take a pay-for-RAM approach after that.

The key to this partnership is interoperability; current AppFog customers deploying their work on other Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers can redeploy the apps to the Rackspace Cloud with zero-code migrations. This provides increased flexibility for AppFog users and helps them avoid vendor lock-in.

Performance and the Cloud

Pete Prestipino — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 22:30:00 GMT

Who provides the fastest cloud service? According to CloudSlueth (a Compuware community), the honors go to Microsoft's Azure platform.

CloudSleuth uses the Gomex performance network to determine the reliability and consistency of popular public IaaS (infrastructure as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service) providers. CloudSleuth runs an identical sample ecommerce application on the popular cloud service providers and measures the results over at least six months of historical data.

Microsoft's Azure platform beat out Google App Engine, GoGrid, OpSource, RackSpace, Amazon, TekLinks, BitRefinery, CloudSigma and several others.

The report, available here, shows a significant difference between Azure servers running near Chicago and those running in Singapore.

Open PaaS from Sullivan Systems

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:53:00 GMT

Sullivan Software Systems has launched an Open Platform as a Service (also known as OPaaS or Open PaaS), which aims to correct the shortcomings of the traditional Platform as a Service (PaaS) model and take the market to the next level with a more logical application ecosystem.

Developers can now use any programming language, any operating system, any development tools, any database, any infrastructure, (e.g., private server, the OPaaS server, Amazon Web Services, Google, or any other cloud) to develop and deliver applications and systems. Developers are no longer limited to creating closed, proprietary applications for a particular limited platform or "walled-garden" as is the case with current Platform as a Service offerings such as Force.com, Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, etc.

From the release: "Open Platform as a Service brings all the pieces together seamlessly for programmers and users in a self-sustaining ecosystem. Also, because Open Platform as a Service works over standard HTTP, developers can easily incorporate existing scripts, applications, web services etc. There are no longer limits on application creation. If it can be imagined, it can be created and delivered instantly on a scalable platform."

"We've come so far on the Internet, but yet have taken a great leap backwards in terms of Platforms as a Service offerings which, thus far, have been very limited" said Kwok Lo, lead developer at Sullivan Software Systems. "Under any other circumstances, nobody in their right mind would pick a platform where the vendor dictates the single or proprietary programming language, the operating system, the server, the database and limited proprietary application programming interface (API) and sets the price as well as the rules and can change them at any point and put you out of business after or even before they go out of business."

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