GigaSpaces Updates Cloudify With App Orchestration
GigaSpaces Technologies, a provider of middleware designed to ease application deployment in the cloud, has revamped its Cloudify orchestration platform to help automate management of applications once they have been deployed.
New York-based GigaSpaces said its Cloudify 3.0 version focuses on app deployment, scaling, and management on a range of cloud environments, including the SoftLayer public cloud and public and private clouds based on the open source OpenStack cloud controller and soon the VMware vSphere/vCloud alternative.
Since most orchestration tools have focused primarily on application installation, management often occurs after deployment. Hence, custom and costly tools are often required to manually manage processes like monitoring and logging.
GigaSpaces claims its redesigned Cloudify platform can help manage the full application lifecycle through a "feedback loop" that automates cloud-based application fixes and updates without manual intervention.
The goal is to reduce the complexity of cloud app management while ensuring that managed applications comply with service-level agreements.
The company said its intent was to add new intelligence to the orchestration of applications in the cloud by eliminating the barrier between orchestration and monitoring. The resulting software-defined mechanism automatically reacts to monitored events with appropriate corrections. Among other tools, version 3.0 includes a workflow engine and modeling language designed to automate a given process or stack.
GigaSpaces said a subsequent released due out during the fourth quarter of 2014 will add monitoring policies for automated triggering of corrective measures. The result will be new auto-healing and auto-scaling capabilities, it added.
The company also touted tighter integration with OpenStack as it becomes a de facto standard for private clouds. It said the redesign of Cloudify corresponds to the design principles of OpenStack services like rewriting core services in the Python programming language while leveraging common building blocks like the RabbitMQ enterprise messaging system.
The redesigned platform also contains plug-ins for vSphere and Apache CloudStack. Plug-ins for vCloud and SoftLayer are scheduled to be available soon, GigaSpaces said, as are support for Docker containers. Plugs-ins for Docker containers for Amazon Web Services, Linux, and other stacks supporting Docker are scheduled for release in the next several weeks.
Version 3.0 also supports TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications) used to describe a set of automation steps used with cloud applications. A future release of Cloudify also will include syntax compatibility with the TOSCA spec when it is officially supported.
Along with Cloudify, GigaSpaces' other product line is its XAP In-Memory Computing platform. XAP is positioned as a software platform that processes data and applications in real time.
In June, the company announced a partnership with flash storage specialist SanDisk to extend the XAP platform to store and analyze hundreds of terabytes of data near the speed of DRAM memory but at the cost of flash storage. The partners said they would target applications in SSD-based datacenters.
