There are some fundamental facts of business IT life as it stands today, one of which is that many businesses, from the smallest to the largest, have built their IT resources on the Microsoft stack. For them, this represents a huge investment in not only applications but IP that extends from software code to business processes.
Another fact is that a large number of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), have built their products to run on top of that same Microsoft stack. It is a business model that has worked, and continues to work well.
So anything that helps those businesses, from end users to ISVs, find out whether they can exploit the Cloud to their advantage is worth investigating.
US-based hosting services company, Apprenda, has come up with just such a `something’ in the form Apprenda Express. Not to be too unsubtle about it, the company is offering what it claims is the first downloadable Platform as a Service (PaaS) environment as a sales gambit; it provides a free `sandbox’ in which developers can test drive their applications and systems in a cloud-delivery environment. It can be found here.
Apprenda provides an open PaaS stack built on Microsoft’s .NET. The target market is all those businesses already built on an established Microsoft stack that are looking to transform their existing infrastructure into a self-service Cloud application platform.
By decoupling applications from infrastructure, and the developer community from IT, this opens up the possibility for businesses to take their existing investments in applications and development into an infrastructure where they can exploit the scalability, greater operational flexibility and faster business agility that is possible with the cloud.
This also makes it well suited both to end-user businesses looking to build private Cloud environments, and ISVs looking to extend their marketplace by offering SaaS-delivered products.
Saying that is one thing, but making the move can be another. And the bigger the commitment to any established IT stack, the risky making the move can appear. For end-user businesses it not only involves evaluating a number of possible PaaS providers to identify the most suitable, but also evaluating the existing applications portfolio to establish which of them demand to be kept on-premise, which are best suited to cloud-based delivery and what level of re-engineering work might be required to make that happen.
For the ISVs, the key engineering problem is likely to be what is involved in turning their existing applications into services that can be run in a cost-effective, multi-tenanted environment.
The Express download is designed to give those developers and IT departments the tools needed to find out. It provides them with a production-ready .NET PaaS, configured to run on up to 12GBs of RAM, without any other restrictions. According to the company, it can handle all of the complex development challenges associated with building and delivering Cloud applications.
It incorporates all the main features and functions of the Apprenda 3.0 platform as a self-installable product. According to the company this means that applications can be not only deployed to Cloud rapidly but they also inherit benefits of the Apprenda platform.
Apprenda Express provides the same architectural components and application services as the full Apprenda solution, including application management tools; frameworks and APIs to access higher order value; and, it utilises a run-time model that sits underneath applications as they execute and abstracts away non-strategic details and complexities.
