Makara and VMware Join Forces for a Fully Self-Service Experience on vCloud Express

Today, VMware announced its partnership with Makara for vCloud Express, making us the first application deployment and management solution to be available on a vCloud implementation.  Enterprises that use the combined solution can now offer their application teams a self-service experience in which they can deploy and manage their applications in the cloud without changing the applications or middleware.

We’re particularly excited because this alliance provides us with a chance to bring our self-service, self-managing solution to an emerging industry standard.  It gives us the opportunity to address an important problem that has been priority one since day one: getting applications rapidly deployed in the cloud and continuing to scale them in the future.

While there are those on the vanguard who have undertaken the effort to write an application for cloud deployment, the amount of manual labor required plus the lack of a portable standard has held most developers back. The Makara/vCloud solution available today addresses both of these concerns:

-       vCloud is a standard that is available on an increasing number of cloud providers, and is planned to be available on private clouds based on VMware technology
-      Makara provides easy to use automation around all the manual labor normally required to get an application up and running – from getting   hardware provisioned, configuring the OS and application dependencies, getting security and performance parameters setup right, adding on management agents: it’s a lot of time spent not writing code, which destroys project schedules.

Customers need a solution that enables developers to rapidly on-board and monitor cloud-based applications to alleviate these major issues.  Makara provides that for the ecosystem of vCloud service providers, delivering scalability, management, and a clear look at applications running in the cloud.

There is a category of solutions called Platform-as-a-Service which provide this kind of automation for web applications. With Makara you get the same automation benefits of other PaaS solutions, but with the additional choice of infrastructure providers.

The things we see developers wanting the most are self-service and ease of use. They want to stand up new applications and new versions of existing applications quickly! Our partnership with VMware delivers on all these points.  Once developers get a taste of working with an automated cloud solution, we’re convinced they’ll never want to go back to the frustrating manual deployment and management steps that are the current status quo.