AppFog PaaS Continues to Add Ecosystem Partners, Capabilities 
Cloud-based PaaS firm AppFog continues to expand its ecosystem of third-party providers. Blitz.io and Iron.io are the latest to join AppFog’s add-on program, which already sports offerings from New Relic, MongoLab, MailGun and MongoHQ.
Cloud-based PaaS (platform-as-a-service) firm AppFog continues to expand its ecosystem of third-party providers. Blitz.io and Iron.io are the latest to join AppFog’s add-on program, which already sports offerings from New Relic, MongoLab, MailGun and MongoHQ.
AppFog’s cloud-based PaaS automates the deployment, scaling and management of cloud applications, and supports 20,000 applications built by thousands of devs using a variety of languages, including PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, Node.js and Perl.
AppFog’s approach to a PaaS ecosystem is not simply recruiting partner products to its PaaS platform, AppFog’s CEO and founder Lucas Carlson told IDN. Rather, AppFog’s model is to make third-party technologies available via a unified intuitive interface. This unified UI lets customers more easily access and integrate functionality into applications they build on AppFog’s platform, he added.
IDN asked the AppFog CEO about his company’s PaaS architecture as well as its benefits to enterprise dev and deployment teams.
“Platform as a service (PaaS) like AppFog provides a way for enterprises to take advantage of their infrastructure investment in a way they never could before,” Carlson said. “In the past, enterprises used to assign servers to projects, even if a project did not need an entire server. This led to vastly under-utilizing compute resources.”
The AppFog PaaS approach also differs from traditional infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) models, Carlson added. “IaaS provides a way to get virtual machines to projects faster, but does not take full advantage of the resources provisioned. PaaS allows enterprises to manage app lifecycles across multiple projects and AppFog is building tools to make that easier, faster and more effective.”
Lucas Carlson
Founder & CEO, AppFog
AppFog’s PaaS partner program, launched in December, aims to let devs easily design, deploy and scale web-based applications using a unified interface to access multiple features. AppFog’s PaaS approach is also aimed at making it easy for third-party cloud services providers to integrate into the company’s cloud platform. AppFog’s latest third-party recruits are:
- Blitz (from Mu Dynamics) is an API-friendly, cloud-based load, scale and performance testing solution that can support mobile, cloud, and web application dev projects by eliminating script creation processes. Blitz allows devs to instantly load test their APIs and cloud apps without creating complex test scripts. Blitz also brings load and performance testing into the development cycle, enabling developers to simply launch load tests of their applications anytime, anywhere.
- Iron.io brings two core offerings to the AppFog PaaS. IronWorker is an easy-to-use and massively scalable task queue, designed to give cloud developers a simple way to offload front-end tasks and manage their scheduled jobs and background processing. IronMQ provides devs with flexible and scalable ready-to-use reliable messaging. It is specially designed to let different parts of a cloud application connect with and scale independently from other processes. </LI>
To simplify dev access to such add-ons, AppFog created what Carlson called “a single sign on interface” between AppFog and partner technologies. “This way, as [partners] improve their services, AppFog customers can take full advantage of the new features instantly,” he added. The AppFog ecosystem is “all about helping developers deploy applications with velocity and grace.”
As an example, to access Blitz from the AppFog console, it takes users only one click to install Blitz and set up a Blitz account. “You click Manage, type any URL from your application, and you are off to the races. You can do load testing, performance testing, capacity testing within a few seconds,” Carlson said.
AppFog also provides features to improve performance, if testing shows performance is unsatisfactory. “This is where AppFog really shines,” Carlson told IDN. “We have built an N-tier system with load balancers, caching servers, app servers and database servers. Not only that, we added redundancy and failover to each tier. You can go from one to fifty virtual machines in seconds with AppFog.”
Carlson explained that AppFog paid so much attention to this aspect of PaaS because of hard-won experience with other application performance issues.
“Concurrency with web development is a problem that can be solved with horizontal scalability,” Carlson said. “Typically developers have had two choices in the past. Shared hosting and dedicated hosting. Shared hosting had no horizontal growth capacity at all. Dedicated hosting could grow, but you would need to do it all yourself. Load balancers, networking, security, firewalls, failover, etc. This is difficult work. With AppFog, we turn it into a slider.”
AppFog will continue to enhance is PaaS offering in 2012, including real-time performance monitoring and tools to automatically notice, notify, and handle spikes in load, Carlson added.
AppFog’s latest partners really like the PaaS partner approach. “The integration of Blitz [enables] developers to quickly create rock solid applications without having to learn the nuances of load and performance testing." said Mu Dynamics co-founder Ajit Sancheti in a statement.
“When it comes to message handling and background processing, most developers spend a lot of time creating and managing these components. Through our partnership [with AppFog], developers can spend far less time managing infrastructure and far more time on areas of their application that really matter,” Chad Arimura, CEO and co-founder of Iron.io added
