Just in: Makara Cloud Application Platform, Developer Edition

I am very excited to report that, after months of under-the-radar development, today we are launching the Makara Cloud Application Platform, Developer Beta today. This software enables developers to take their existing Tomcat, JBoss or PHP applications and get them running in minutes on a long list of supported cloud environments: public or private, external or internal. Best of all, hairy details such as clustering, management, and monitoring are already built-in. Developers today want to deploy, scale and manage their applications without being held up by provisioning and deployment. They want to turn their applications «on», instantly.

I'm thrilled that we can now enable developers to launch new services quickly by leveraging public and private clouds. Consider deploying a new version of an application to a cluster: instead of messing around with transferring files to a server and then tweaking them to match another environment, developers simply export the application from their working machine and import it in the target environment in the cloud, be it testing, staging, or production. Think about everything you would normally have to do: set up machines, configure a load balancer, tweak the code to match the environment, deploy across the cluster, and so forth. Do you really want to tweak ant and maven scripts (and that's if you're lucky; if you're unlucky you're tweaking bash scripts) every time? Did you really want to set those up in the first place? Don't you wish you could just tell the computer: «deploy my copy to staging and replicate it out to the cluster»? And then have those management and monitoring goodies built-in, with all their juicy details and a nice display?

In short, this software enables developers to stop worrying about setting up, scaling and maintaining software stacks just to run their application and focus on coding their application instead. Try it now!

When I am developing web applications, this is the platform I would want to work with. In my previous life as an operations director, one of the things we struggled with constantly was rolling out new versions of our application. We'd put together a release, roll it into our staging environment, run tests, then deploy it into production. Each time we moved from environment to environment would take 6 hours... in fact one of my colleagues put together a video of the process (and he had to increase the frame rate 6x to make it slightly less mind-numbing). A lot of people had to be kept in the loop and mistakes were being made frequently. We didn't have good visibility into the runtime performance or behavior of the application. Debugging things was a very punishing process of diving through 60 servers worth of log files. Of course I could think of architectural ways to make things more stable, of isolating changes in the code, etc, but the problem is when you're trying to release 50 times a month and there's constantly pressure to roll out new versions of the application, you just don't have time to solve these issues from the inside.

When I first used a virtualized environment, I thought, "This is how we could do things a better way." From scaling up an application to rolling out new applications, all of us web developers need tools that automate the 70% Undifferentiated Heavy Lifting Werner Vogels has brought to everyone's attention: all these tasks required to set up, scale, maintain, and monitor the infrastructure that runs these applications need to simply go away. With a cloud or virtualization, we can now get access to machines in minutes, but if it still takes two weeks to setup the environment to run the application, we haven't realized the benefits of the cloud.

With a cloud or virtualization, we can now get access to machines in minutes, but if it still takes two weeks to setup the environment to run the application, we haven't realized the benefits of the cloud.

There is yet more undifferentiated heavy lifting lurking in the application stack. There is an operating system to install, maintain, and secure, applications and web servers to configure, logs need to be rotated and consolidated, the machine health needs to be monitored, and so forth. All just in order to run an application. Sure you can start with a template, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Our application platform makes this go away. It does all remaining heavy lifting for you.

The face of the Makara Cloud Application Platform is a console that lets you on-board your application, unmodified. And capacity adjustments are incredibly simple – you can scale your cluster by adding nodes or right-size it by dropping running nodes. To see how the application is doing, you'll then pull up the dashboard and see a number of views of the transactions being served by the cluster now or in the past. You can compare timeframes for easy baselining. The dashboard gives you 360º visibility into the application's performance and resource usage, including network time to download pages. And when that change request comes in, updating the code and re-deploying the application across the cluster is just a few simple clicks. Holy smokes: All these views are even interconnected, so you'll see on the dashboard when a change was made to an app, an app was restarted, or a machine added to the cluster.

This is just the first glimpse of our vision of how we see applications to really take off in the cloud, but it's already a big step, both for us and for the developer, so I'd like to encourage you to give it a try: http://www.makara.com/TryIt. And let us know what you think!

Do you want to be part of the game-changing revolution in how applications are deployed and run that is currently happening in the IT landscape? Then you should sign up for the Open Source project we are about to launch. But this is something I'll talk about another day…