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The feature can already be seen in ComodIT’s own application store and on the website of lifestreaming platform Storytlr, but is now available for anyone to use. In effect, it makes the installation of server-based apps a lot more like that of mobile apps – an almost one-click experience that even allows users to “share” the apps in question on Facebook and Twitter.

“You can embed the application – just copy and paste [a few lines of Javascript] and put it on your website. You add the direct install blue button and you allow anyone to install that application directly from your website,” ComodIT CEO Daniel Bartz told me.

Bartz suggested this approach would overcome the traditional open-source server software installation experience, which sometimes involves multi-page tutorials. The test-drive aspect is pretty neat too: when that option is chosen, ComodIT basically installs and runs the app for a free 100 minutes in an Amazon EC2 micro instance.

It makes marketing a bit easier for developers and of course it steers people towards ComodIT’s own distribution platform and wider services. As Bartz explained:

“When you click ‘direct install’, in fact you connect to ComodIT and you create a server on which you will install an OS and all the things that have to be done for installing applications. We’re automating the manual procedure – we do this like we do for any other pieces of ComodIT following the devops approach.

“Behind the scenes, we’re activating recipes for deployments. Within your ComodIT account you have access to all the recipes and descriptions that you usually have. The next step is deploying the application not only for testing but also for production, with all the ComodIT features like autoscaling and autobackup.

“We bring the user onto the platform and, as we have a business model based on the number of servers you’re managing with ComodIT, if you have more users installing the application through the direct install button, we’re a happy provider.”

It’s a smart idea and one that could give ComodIT a boost as it competes with the likes of Opscode and Puppet Labs (see disclosure) for devops’ attention.

ComodIT was a finalist in our Structure:Europe LaunchPad competition last year. This year’s Structure:Europe will take place in London from 18-19 September and, if you can’t wait until then for a high-level get-together around cloud automation and other such topics, don’t forget that our San Francisco Structure event is coming up on 19-20 June, too.

Here’s a video explaining how ComodIT’s direct install button works:

Disclosure:Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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But Dyn doesn’t want to offer that to its customers; it will transform the app into a tool for devops. In other words, instead of integrating with Salesforce.com, Marketo, Google Analytics and other data sources, users will be able to bring together application-performance management data from providers such as New Relic and Compuware’s Gomez alongside analytics on domain-name server queries and big email campaigns. That sort of mobile app could make it easy for devops guys to see from home if applications are operating without issue, email campaigns are working as they should and DNS queries are going through data centers as they should and within the bounds of what customers have signed up for. If there are issues, devops should be alerted that they need to act.

The acquisition, whose terms were not disclosed, ties in nicely with website-performance analytics technology from Verelo, which Dyn also has acquired.

Cory von Wallenstein, Dyn’s chief technology officer (pictured), was the original investor in Trendslide. He will speak about upgrading infrastructure while maintaining uptime at GigaOM’s Structure conference in San Francisco on June 20.

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Opscode, the name behind the Chef tools that many developers use to automate the configuration and deployment of IT, has got more than a toehold in the cloud landscape. Earlier this week Joyent, another cloud provider, said it was integrating Chef into the Joyent cloud.

As I wrote then, tools like Chef, CFEngine and Puppet Labs’ Puppet (see disclosure) ease the creation and management of system configurations. A key benefit is that, once the associated scripts of a deployment are created, they can be deployed regardless of the underlying operating system or, in this case, cloud. At least in theory.

Opscode VP of marketing Jay Wampold says IBM and Microsoft’s moves show that enterprise customers are ready for cloud-type deployments. “If you look back over a decade, you see that Google, Facebook and Amazon figured out how to leverage large-scale infrastructure to deliver to consumers built from the ground up on code. Now you’re seeing major [older] enterprises moving IT from a back-office support function for internal operations into a front-office effort that is a touch point for consumers,” Wampold said.

That means enterprises need to develop, configure, test, deploy and monitor applications in web time and at web scale, which is where the devops movement and tools like Chef and Puppet come in. IBM bought UrbanCode, another devops player, earlier this week.

The devops school pushes developers and IT people to work together on fast, incremental tech deployments rather than at cross-purposes. Where Chef and Puppet differ is that Chef focuses more on developers while Puppet concentrates on admins — the “ops” side of devops.

As part of this deal, Opscode has agreed to support IBM’s AIX Unix operating system.

The news of the past few months seems to indicate that Chef has momentum  – although an IT person who watches this space would not give Chef the edge, necessarily. “Chef and Puppet both seem to be doing great. The push by AWS and Joyent is probably more a function of the fact that Chef is easier to stand up as a hosted service than Puppet,” he noted.

Another factor could be that VMware recently invested $30 million more in Puppet, something that makes some businesses wary> The fear is that Puppet won’t be totally dedicated to heterogeneous environments, a worry that Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies denies. The VMware relationship does help Puppet in the private cloud market  but “we’re not changing our roadmap for VMware, and they don’t have anything resembling a controlling stake,” Kanies said via email.

Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Cleveland-based UrbanCode’s software helps automate the production and delivery of new applications in a way IBM said is aligned with its own SmartCloud and Mobile First initiatives. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but the company’s 50 employees will now be part of IBM Software’s Rational group, according to IBM Software director of marketing Randy Newell.

According to IBM’s statement, UrbanCode will work nicely with IBM’s Worklight mobile application development platform:

” … by combining UrbanCode software with the IBM MobileFirst Worklight technology, businesses can now author and deploy an application for any mobile device in hours, versus a previous multi-day timeline. The UrbanCode solution also works with traditional applications including middleware, databases and business intelligence.”

Legacy IT giants like IBM are trying to find ways to strip out overhead of the development process, particularly for mobile and cloud apps, in order to better compete with leaner, more nimbler startups. For example, last August, BMC, which competes with IBM in systems management tools, bought Varalogix to bolster its devops story.

IBM applies devops concepts to the whole software life cycle including planning, development, testing, deployment, monitoring and feedback phases, Newell said. UrbanCode fits into the deployment piece of the cycle , while IBM’s acquisition of Greenhat in January fills in a testing check box and its buyout of Tealeaf in May 2012, figures into the feedback module.

IBM, the 100-year-old IT giant that has managed to stay relevant by changing when needed, is really focusing on cloud and mobile — and the middleware to power those efforts — to such an extent that it is reportedly thinking of selling off its server business to Lenovo.

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• Cloud and data third-quarter 2012
• Continuous delivery and the world of devops
• New challenges for the IT organization

Getting started

Before you do anything else, if you haven’t already read The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win, by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford. If you don’t absolutely identify with the pain felt by the characters at the beginning of the book, or with the wisdom of the approach introduced by the end, then this concept probably won’t click with you. However, if you’ve spent any time involved in enterprise IT at all, I’m betting this book will hit home, both intellectually and emotionally.

After that, the previous posts in this series provide some good background, as well:

• Devops, complexity and anti-fragility in IT: An introduction
• Devops, complexity and anti-fragility in IT: Risk and anti-fragility
• Devops, complexity and anti-fragility in IT: Stability and resilience
• Is your PaaS composable or contextual? (Hint: the answer matters)

Complexity and anti-fragility

Although I don’t love everything about Nasem Taleb’s Anti-Fragile: Things that Gain from Disorder, it is undeniably one of the most important books I’ve read in a while. The reason for this is that it articulates a key concept that is often missed by those of us that seek resiliency in systems: that there is a class of systems that show a behavior that actually gains from randomness. In other words, they tend to move toward a “better” state over the course of both positive and negative variation in their environments. The post on risk and anti-fragility that I link to above covers this concept in more depth, but the book explores the concept in many different contexts.

The best book on complex systems that I’ve read to date remains Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, by M. Mitchell Waldrop. The telling for the story behind the founding of the Santa Fe Institute, still considered the hub of complex systems science, Waldrop’s book covers much of both the concepts and the methods of exploring complex systems (and its critical subset, complex adaptive systems). It is a little out of date now, however.

If you prefer to learn by doing, Margaret Mitchell’s ”Introduction to Complexity” course through the Santa Fe Institute is an excellent 101- level course on the subject, though tilted heavily toward the academic study of the subject,. The only focus on practical applications comes via interviews with famous complex systems scientists.

Devops and continuous integration

For devops, in particular, there are a lot of great sources available online, as well:

• A decent overview (with a decent list of both cultural and technical elements of devops) is “Devops: An Introduction,” a slide presentation from Patrick Dubois.
• Anything written by John Willis and Gene Kim at ITRevolution, John Allspaw and his crew at Etsy, the team at Netflix, and a host of others are worth reading as well.
• My favorite source for devops learning, however, is the DevOps Weekly newsletter, a very well-curated list of reading material each weekend. Definitely a must if you want to understand devops in depth and in real time.

I hope everyone has gained something from these posts. I certainly believe this shift in focus — from risk avoidance to anti-fragility, from a focus on stability to a focus on resilience, and from a focus on large-grained contextual systems to small-grained composable alternatives — will and is opening a whole new world of agility, experimentation and execution for enterprise IT. It’s a critical subject for every IT practitioner to understand.

This is, of course, only a partial list of the many amazing books, web sites, blogs and events that I’ve used to explore this topic. I encourage you to add your favorites to the comments below, or share them with me on Twitter, where I am @jamesurquhart.

James Urquhart is vice president of products at enStratius and a regular GigaOM contributor.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Linda Parton.

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Cloudmunch CEO Pradeep Prabhu

Cloudmunch portrays its offering as a “full stack continuous delivery” system that handles continuous integration, automated testing and continuous deployment. It supports both Github and Opscode Chef. Users can sign in with their Github ID to start what it now promises will be an integrated process to take their code from cradle to end user device.

This is part of the whole trend toward “democratizing” pieces of IT so that developers can develop what they want without having to wrestle with the set up and maintenance and updates of their tools.

“This illustrates the rather sexy notion of continuous development and delivery of code,” said Bryan Hale, VP of online services for Opscode.

Right now developers at smaller companies probably look at things like Werker which won GigaOM’s Launchpad Europe competition, Electric Cloud, CloudBees, CircleCI and Atlassian Bamboo to attack the continuous integration part of this problem. Larger companies might look at Nolio or legacy offerings from BMC and IBM for deployment and release automation.

Cloudmunch CEO Pradeep Prabhu acknowledges all of that competition, but maintains that his platform puts all the pieces of the puzzle together.  And, he notes, for $25  per month for one code repo and five nodes, CloudMunch lets developers focus just on their code by providing a “complete continuous delivery platform hosted, managed and maintained.”

If it’s as easy as advertised, that could be a compelling story.

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Bain Capital Ventures, Business Development Bank of Canada, Egan-Managed Capital and JMI Equity led the round, which brings the total AppNeta has raised to $47.8 million.

AppNeta, which has offices in Boston and Vancouver, B.C., offers Software as a Service (SaaS) that gauges the performance of the components of a customer’s site and lag times attributable to web servers, the network and an end user’s browser. Those services are known as application-performance management (APM). The SaaS also breaks out performance of the networks underlying the apps and data the site depends on to run on end users’ devices — what’s called network-performance management (NPM). The data from AppNeta can quickly show devops employees when and how performance is not meeting service-level agreements (SLAs) and take action accordingly.

The APM market looks a bit like a venture capital and product-feature arms race. Last week New Relic, fresh off an $80 million round of funding, announced the ability to monitor end users’ mobile experiences. After recently picking up $50 million, AppDynamics moved more toward IT automation in a new product release last week, and it appears poised to add mobile-app support in the near future.

The NPM market lacks the current momentum of APM, although there is competition from SevOne, which got $150 million in January; Riverbed and other vendors.

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Anyone who does development work is probably using a half dozen or more services and spends a good part of her day toggling back and forth among various screens. Appsecute itself was using 14 different services, according to CEO and co-founder Mark Cox. That’s a lot of toggling.

That decentralized information glut is also inefficient in other ways. “Just because a support request comes in doesn’t mean you should interrupt all your developers,” Cox said. Getting the right alerts to the right person and then logging that this person is on the case in a timeline means the rest of the developers keep their heads down on what they were doing.

The timeline for devops goes to beta now with connectors included for Github code repository and versioning system, Zendesk  and Tender Support customer service software; CircleCI’s continuous integration tool; and AppFog, Cloudfoundry.com, and Heroku PaaSes. Appsecute also promises connectors will come for New Relic, Amazon Web Services, the full Cloud Foundry, Travis CI, Jenkins CI, Team City, Pingdom, PagerDuty, RSS, Twitter, Facebook, SNMP, Nodejitsu, EngineYard, OpenShift, Rackspace, Nagios, Sendgrid, Mailchimp and Cloudability.

What’s happening in cloud echoes what went on in the earlier distributed computing model. As  companies deployed multiple on-premises applications, they soon came to want a single way to view and (hopefully) manage all that IT. That led to the rise of systems and applications management consoles and other windows into their myriad services.

So expect more of these products in the cloud realm as well.

“A number of social stream services have aspects of what we do, particularly the timeline side, [while] other services focus on graphs and metrics. We want to specialize in putting events into the context of the software applications and components that devops care about,” Cox said.

Indeed, adding a specialized social networking layer to devops tools is not new. Wercker, a  Dutch startup that offers a SaaS-based continuous integration tool  (and which won GigaOM’s Structure Europe Launchpad competition) also touts its Facebook-like timeline as a major plus for devops.

Providing  the proverbial “single pane of glass” to all important services is an attractive proposition, but it would seem to me that inclusion of AWS into the mix had better come quickly.

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New Opscode Private Chef dashboard.

Opscode says it beat rivals CFEngine and Puppet Labs (see disclosure) in a bake-off to become Facebook’s configuration tool of choice and that Facebook, which was a CFEngine shop, actually helped it test out  the new version of Private Chef over the last few months.

Playing up the Facebook angle

In a Chef press release, Facebook production engineer Phil Dibowitz is quoted saying: “Opscode Private Chef provided an automation solution flexible enough to bend to our scale dynamics without requiring us to change our workflow.”

Opscode execs would not comment on the actual size of the Facebook test bed — but called it “Carl Sagan-sized big.”

Having Facebook as its big, cool customer/friend also helps Opscode counter the fact that Puppet Labs’ big cool customer/friend is Google.  (Google Ventures also invested in Puppet).

“The biggest thing for this release [of Chef] was to get to scale..and a lot of what we did in this release for Facebook was stuff we were planning to do ourselves anyway, Facebook just gave us a huge test bed,” Opscode CTO Christopher Brown said in an interview. For this project, Opscode rebuilt much of its basic stack in a new language and moved its core database from CouchDB for PostgreSQL.

“We realized the way we built our original server with Ruby and our older stack wasn’t giving us the concurrency and scale we wanted so we rewrote it in Erlang and went from NoSQL to, believe it or not, a relational database,” said Jay Wampold, VP of marketing for Opscode. Opscode’s rather symmetrical workload is actually better suited to what relational databases do. Because Chef typically does as  many writes and its schema are not all that deep and complex, a relational database is well suited to the job, he said.

CFEngine, Puppet and Chef are all used by  developers and systems admins to automate provisioning and change management for massive scale-out cloud computing environments. Their use is critical to the DevOps movement in which software developers and operations people work together to make sure software projects meet business goals.

One code base, three routes to market

Old Opscode Command-line interface.

The three flavors of Chef all build off the same foundation:  Private Chef runs in-house behind the firewall; Hosted Chef is a hosted managed service offering; and open-source Chef is a free download. But with the new Chef 11 code base, Opscode is changing up its sales and support models. First, Private Chef, which used to be offered as a perpetual license, will now be available by subscription and cost $6 per node per month — the same pricing as Hosted Chef. Second, the company now will offer two paid support options for the open-source version of Chef for customers updating to the new Chef 11-based version. Price for a standard support subscription will be $3 per node per month; premium is $3.75 per node per month.

Opscode also announced a slew of new channel partners including CDW, Ingram Micro, SoftChoice and ISVs Autodesk and Collabnet, with an eye of pushing Chef more broadly to market.

Last March, when the company announced a Series C round of  $19.5 million, Opscode launched what it called a broad push to entrench its tools in enterprise accounts. In that attempt, its new Facebook-endorsed scale could be a help with the largest of potential customers.

Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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