GigaSpaces is jostling for headroom in the increasingly crowded cloud application platform arena with its new Cloudify offering. Described in grand terms as the first platform for service-based application delivery to offer on-boarding with zero code changes, GigaSpaces says mission-critical apps in any cloud type are supported.
"Enterprises increasingly want to move to the cloud — whether private or hybrid — to gain the benefits of agility and cost reduction. However, deploying mission-critical applications to the cloud can present significant challenges," said Adi Paz, EVP marketing and business development at GigaSpaces. "Today, achieving cloud benefits requires vast investments of time and resources to rewrite applications, and so the bulk of enterprise business apps have still not made the move. Cloudify eliminates these barriers. "
The company asserts that it has received high-level industry partner trust to back up the validity of its new launch and specifies that GigaSpaces has recently entered multiple partnerships based on these capabilities, including partnering with Microsoft to deliver a specialized edition, Cloudify for Azure, which is designed to enable on-boarding Java applications onto the Azure cloud. Other collaborations include work with Citrix and Rackspace to create an open PaaS solution with OpenStack (CloudStack included).
These are the factors that GigaSpaces is using to justify Cloudify as the only platform that supports any cloud, with specific integration with the most diverse array of cloud environments. "Moreover, Cloudify makes it possible to take any application and run it in a local development environment and then move it to your cloud of choice, whether private or public, completely seamlessly with only a simple configuration switch," said the company, in a press statement.
Cloudify was designed on the principles of using a recipe-based deployment mechanism so that it can deploy any middleware stack (Java/Spring, JEE, PHP, .NET, Ruby on Rails, or others), whether a relational or non-relational data store is employed (e.g., MySQL or Apache Cassandra), or if other middleware components are added. In addition, Cloudify provides support for application services based on the GigaSpaces XAP stack.
The choice-enabler is Cloudify's Open Cloud Driver, which provides an open plug-in that leverages and extends the jclouds framework. Cloudify comes with a set of ready-made plug-ins that support common public and private cloud environments. Unlike other cloud platforms, Cloudify was designed to also support non-virtualized environments, enabling deployment of a fully elastic application on top of bare metal machines. This is important (so says GigaSpaces) for network-sensitive applications that want to leverage the cost benefits and agility of cloud-based environments but are not ready to take the performance hit that often comes with virtualizing the network environment.
