According to co-founder Alex Loddengaard, Levy began building MemCachier as a side project in mid-2011, and he hosted a private beta version in the Heroku add-on market so a friend could easily access the service. The team at Heroku saw the service, liked it and encouraged Levy to pursue it for real. Levy, who’s still in the middle of getting a Ph.D. from Stanford, called Loddengaard (who taught Levy while a teaching assistant at the University of Washington) and fellow Stanford Ph.D. candidate David Terei for help, and MemCachier launched in April 2012.

Alex Loddengaard

Landing Loddengaard wasn’t too tough. He had quit his job at software-development firm Atlassian, after beginning his career at Google and then following his boss Christophe Bisciglia to Hadoop pioneer Cloudera, where Loddengaard was a pre-funding employee. (MemCachier, by the way, now shares office space with Bisciglia’s new company, WibiData, in the former Atlassian headquarters.) He was living off his savings, had “built a bunch of stupid web apps that you never heard of” and was trying to figure out what to do next, he told me. And then Levy called.

Memcached, and MemCachier, are everywhere

Memcached is a popular open-source key-value system that speeds up web applications by caching certain data in the memory of distributed systems rather than on disk in the database itself. Facebook is widely cited as the largest user for the hundreds of terabytes it’s now storing in memcached, but, Loddengaard said, “Every company that needs to scale uses memcached.”

Aside from the core open source version, developers might choose the Couchbase’s eponymous NoSQL database (into which the popular memcached implementation Membase Server has been integrated) or its hosted Membase service called Memcache, which is available on Heroku. Another hosted option is AWS’s ElastiCache, a membased-compliant service available to developers building web applications on the Amazon EC2 cloud.

Since starting off on Heroku, MemCachier has already expanded to the AppHarbor and Cloud Control platforms, but Wednesday’s expansion represents  the company’s first real introduction to the public, Loddengaard said. Now, MemCachier is also available on AppFog, CloudBees and DotCloud — three popular PaaS offerings — as well as Amazon EC2.

Growing isn’t always easy

Moving to Amazon’s cloud, in particular, also meant a change in pricing to reflect a different class of user (e.g., AWS mega-user Netflix) than most PaaS offerings attract. Whereas MemCachier’s options on Heroku range from 100MB to 10GB in size, Amazon users can get up to a 100GB instance. Loddengaard said most Amazon EC2 users use more than a gigabyte of RAM for memcached, and ElastiCache actually starts out at 1.3GB.

MemCachier’s architecture, simplified.

Loddengaard acknowledges that trying to woo developers away from ElastiCache service on Amazon’s own platform won’t necessarily be easy, but he thinks the difference in approach between the two services favors MemCachier for a particular class of developers — those who don’t want to manage their infrastructure too closely. Whereas ElastiCache still requires users to manage their instances, as is the norm with Amazon’s lower-level infrastructure-as-a-service platform, MemCachier is about “no operations whatsoever,” he said. “Developers shouldn’t spend any time operating servers over developing software.”

That mindset has proven effective so far. Thanks to word of mouth alone, the bootstrapped MemCachier has been growing steadily in terms of revenue and users, now claiming more than 1,500 developers, but its broader footprint and some proactive marketing should mean sharp upticks in both areas. However, a jump in users — especially the larger ones that might come from Amazon EC2 — will probably require MemCachier to grow beyond its current three-person team. Of course, there are worse problems to have.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user optimarc.

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Interviewing DotCloud's CEO

DotCloud, the platform as a service that won our Structure 2011 Launchpad competition, said Wednesday that it will support three new data stores as part of its multi-language platform. The company will add MySQL, Redis and MongoDB support.

DotCloud Founder and CEO Solomon Hykes explained that more data stores will come in time, but for now these are popular choices among developers. MySQL is the core of the LAMP stack, Redis is a”Swiss Army knife tool that can be used in all kinds of ways,” and MongoDB has attained considerable maturity as a NoSQL platform of choice.

DotCloud, like many other platforms including Heroku, VMware’s Cloud Foundry and Microsoft’s Azure, supports multiple languages in an attempt to woo both enterprise and independent developers. DotCloud also adds a touch of IaaS to the mix by letting developers lift the covers to monitor performance, track changes and perform other operational tasks. It has raised $10 million in venture capital since its founding in 2010.

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Lucas Carlson, CEO, AppFog

AppFog, which started out as a PHP-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), just added Java to its roster of supported programming languages. Full, multilanguage support is becoming table stakes in the PaaS world, where players like Heroku, DotCloud and Microsoft Windows Azure now give users a broad choice of programming languages to work with.

AppFog (once known as PHP Fog) recently added Ruby and Node.js to its list. Still to come is support for Python, .NET and “smaller languages like Erlang,” said AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson.

Support for Java, which is widely used in enterprise accounts, makes particular sense for AppFog, which estimates that more than half (60 percent) of Java developers build PHP front ends to their applications.

Last August, the Portland, Ore.–based AppFog moved its service onto a foundation of VMware’s open-source Cloud Foundry PaaS. That decision makes it easier for AppFog to support more languages.

“One of the nice things about working with the open-source Cloud Foundry is that people with smaller languages can still contribute to the PaaS and still be supported,” Carlson said.

“PaaS is three layers. If you break it out, the user experience is at the top — the web UI, the pricing — in the middle is the lifecycle management of the applications, and at the bottom is the orchestration with the Infrastructure-as-a-Service players. That’s where the APIs for AWS or Joyent or other underlying services sit. Cloud Foundry does the middle piece for us,” Carlson explained. “We add our secret sauce to make it better atop all that user experience and orchestration.”

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Don't worry about storage, let Amazon cache your content.

Amazon has been adding all kinds of features to attract enterprise users to its Amazon Web Services cloud computing platform, but with a new caching product, it’s turning its focus back to web developers. Tuesday morning, the retailing giant said it will offer resilient caching via a product called ElastiCache, which will help speed up the delivery of applications in the cloud. From the blog posting:

” …given the widespread usage of caching, maintenance of cache servers is no longer a differentiator and everyone will have to uptake it as the “costs of doing business”. Amazon ElastiCache takes away many of the headaches of deploying, operating and scaling the caching infrastructure. A Cache Cluster, which is a set of collaborating Cache Nodes, can be started in minutes. Scaling the total memory in the Cache Cluster is under complete control of the customers as Caching Nodes can be added and deleted on demand. Amazon Cloudwatch can be used to get detailed metrics about the performance of the Cache Nodes. Amazon ElastiCache automatically detects and replaces failed Cache Nodes to protect the cluster from those failure scenarios. Access to the Cache Cluster is controlled using Cache Security Groups giving customers full control over which application components can access which Cache Cluster.

The product is compliant with memcached, a free and open-source system which companies such as Facebook, Zynga and others already use to ensure users don’t have to wait long to see their status updates or gameplay. Amazon’s new product will do the same thing for other app developers who don’t have their own infrastructure, but realize that cache matters. Faster access to data has been a trend that is changing the data center and bringing high-dollar Flash memory into and alongside servers from a variety of vendors.

For Amazon, offering products and tweaks for web developers may be a response to more Platforms-as-a-Service such as Heroku, DotCloud or Red Hat’s Makara platform gaining ground among developers who don’t want to worry about infrastructure. It may also be a response to products that also make it easier to choose your own infrastructure with a PaaS overlay, as VMware’s Cloud Foundry and OpenLogic’s CloudSwing does. With OpenStack making huge strides, Amazon might be feeling the threat of competition on the infrastructure side and also from platforms.

Just a few days ago, Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels posted what he called a “hacker” post aimed at telling bloggers how to host dynamic content on their web pages using Amazon’s storage product instead of their own server. The how-to post highlighted some independent tools and a feature Amazon launched in its S3 product in February. I wondered if Vogels was changing his style a bit to appeal to more casual developers and bloggers, or if this was just a one-off post. My hunch is if Amazon is feeling threatened by the rapidly changing IaaS and PaaS environments, Vogels may put on his “hacker” hat more often.

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Called CloudSwing, OpenLogic’s PaaS supports a variety of application stack components, including LAMP, Nginix, Rails, Node.js, and Tomcat. It also gives developers a choice of infrastructure clouds on which to run, including Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and Microsoft Windows Azure.

CloudSwing attempts to capitalize on the move toward developer choice exemplified lately by existing offerings such as Heroku, DotCloud, AppFog, Red Hat, OpenShift, VMware, Cloud Foundry and even Google App Engine.

CloudSwing is currently available as a Trial Edition in beta, although DevTest and Production editions are in the pipeline.

OpenLogic might have a difficult time gaining traction among the host of existing and popular PaaS offerings, but it does have a significant point of differentiation by offering multiple choices at the infrastructure layer. Other PaaS providers will let users download the code and run it on the IaaS cloud of their choice, but the hosted option is typically limited to one provider.

And it’s still really early in the PaaS evolution, so there’s plenty of time for OpenLogic to make a name for itself. As DotCloud CEO Solomon Hykes pointed out to me a few months ago, all PaaS providers are really just trying to disrupt the legacy application platform space. “If anything,” he said, “it’s a net gain for everyone when a new solution brings something to the cloud camp.”

Image courtesy of Flickr user EvelynGiggles.

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Other PaaS startups might want to pay attention:

Be specialized. And I don’t mean just support a single language, I mean support a single language and have some serious talent to lead the development charge. As I noted when covering CloudBees’ $4 million Series A round late last year, it includes many former JBoss executives and developers among its team, and JBoss founder Marc Fleury is among its investors. If you’re going to do Java, there are worse guys to have on your side.

We’ve seen this tactic deployed by numerous other PaaS startups, too. Heroku recently brought on Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto to lead development of its flagship language, and Joyent now employs Node.js creator Ryan Dahl.

The future of PaaS might be multi-language/framework, as Heroku’s recent support for Node.js and Clojure, as well as VMware Cloud Foundry and DotCloud, illustrate, but single-language will still work. It just has to be done well.

Be inclusive. I mean this in terms of both products and potential user base. CloudBees supports Java developers throughout the application life cycle with two distinct offerings: DEV@cloud, serves up the Jenkins (nee Hudson) development platform as a service, and RUN@cloud, which is CloudBees’ production application runtime environment.

Furthermore, CloudBees has expanded the number of infrastructure options its service can run on to include OpenStack and VMware vSphere in addition to the original Amazon Web Services support. This is a big deal because whereas many PaaS offerings are relegated to running atop a single IaaS cloud, CloudBees users can choose between different public clouds, or even can run the service as software in-house on private cloud infrastructure.

Be first. Here’s the other thing about CloudBees: It wasn’t the first PaaS provider to focus on Java, nor was it the first to offer its service as software that can run on multiple environments. But, as far as I know, it was to first to market with both capabilities.

Already in talks to merge with Java PaaS pioneer Stax Networks, CloudBees sped up the culmination of that deal in late-November after Red Hat bought the JBoss-based Makara. Stax’s service was already running, so CloudBees was able to offer a product earlier than initially expected, while working in the background to integrate its technology. In June, it rolled out a Premium version of RUN@cloud to complement its free version enhanced features.

All of this happened while other Java-based platforms such as VMforce still look like vaporware and Google is still tweaking its enterprise-friendly App Engine with full Java support. Another startup, CumuLogic, is doing PaaS software that can run atop a variety of infrastructure options, but it’s still in beta. Red Hat, too, took its time to productize the Makara platform as OpenShift, which was only recently released in Developer Preview phase.

Of course, it also helps to be a quality platform. CloudBees recently fared well against Google App Engine and Amazon Elastic Beanstalk in a third-party review of Java PaaS offerings.

None of this is to say that CloudBees is or will be the premier Java PaaS provider. Just that it’s not surprising to see it attracting investors’ money.

Image courtesy of Flickr user yomanimus

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Structure 2011 LaunchPad winner

Now is a great time to be a software developer. Programmers can choose from a wide variety of open source languages, databases and frameworks when building applications, and there are lots of solid cloud-based hosting options available to run them on.

But that same level of choice makes it pretty difficult to be an IT manager. A system administrator’s job is to make sure all the elements of an application can run smoothly while being safe and secure. Often times, the more components an organization’s programmers want to use, the more difficult an IT manager’s job becomes. This is one major reason that programmers frequently complain of being held back by their company’s operations team.

San Francisco-based startup DotCloud aims to fix all that. Founded in 2010, DotCloud has developed a Platform-as-a-Service product that automatically configures the components for an application and deploys it to the cloud. What sets DotCloud apart is that it can configure applications stacks built using a variety of different components, from stalwarts such as PHP and MySQL to new kids on the block such as Node.js and MongoDB.

DotCloud provides IT administrators with “one place to manage and secure so that they can see what’s going on in their organization,” co-founder and CEO Solomon Hykes told me in an interview at the Structure 2011 conference held last month in San Francisco. “At the same time, developers can have fun, be productive and move fast.” The full video of our interview is embedded below.

Essentially, DotCloud has constructed an automated system that does all the work a company would typically have to get a highly paid system administrator to do manually. DotCloud also provides centralized monitoring, alerting, and control features to help the IT staff manage applications. Currently, DotCloud’s deployments run on Amazon’s EC2 cloud service, but the technology could theoretically be used as an abstract layer to run applications anywhere from Rackspace to a private cloud.

So far, DotCloud’s offering has proven quite popular. The company won both the audience and judge’s choice awards at Structure 2011; it has raised $10 million in series A funding from Benchmark Capital and Trinity Ventures; and currently counts Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang among its board members. But like any startup worth its salt, DotCloud is not without strong competitors. Since the company was founded, RedHat launched its own platform-as-a-service called OpenShift, and VMware debuted a similar offering called Cloud Foundry.

Hykes told me the new competition only serves to highlight the strength of DotCloud’s original concept. “When we started a year ago, there was one way to do platform as a service, and it was single-stack,” he said. “It’s really great to see validation and to see other players doing the same thing… we’re excited because we’re going in there ready. We’ve got a native multi-stack platform, we’re not bolting on top of an existing silo.”

You can watch my interview with Hykes here:

Image courtesy of DotCloud.

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Here are some highlights from the presentations:

• Acunu CEO Tim Moreton demonstrated how his company helps enterprises achieve “consistently and predictably higher performance” from their commodity hardware systems. Acunu’s technology combines storage stack pipeline into a single platform, promising less latency and more range read throughput.
• Beyondcore CEO Arijit Sengupta described how his San Mateo-based company helps clients utilize the cloud as much as possible by ensuring the privacy and security of their sensitive data. Beyondcore’s SplitSecure technology splits–and later recombines — private information from the more general data that can be stored in the cloud.
• BigSwitch co-founder Kyle Forster demonstrated his company’s Open Flow-based technology platform that purportedly brings the benefits of cloud computing and virtualization to the networking space. According to Forster, the Palo Alto, California-based BigSwitch aims to become the “VMware of networking.”
• Cloudability, led by CEO Mat Ellis, provides a web-based dashboard that allows companies to see all their cloud costs in one place. The Portland, Oregon-based startup, which sends its clients alerts when its cloud spending spikes, aims to be “the Mint.com for the cloud.”
• CloudFloor CTO Imad Mouline demonstrated the company’s cloud management and optimization service. The Waltham, Massachusetts-based company has built its service to help both IT and business people get control and visibility over their cloud operations.
• DotCloud CEO Solomon Hyes described his company’s platform-as-a-service offering, that allows developers to run any major application or database stack in the cloud, regardless of the programming language or database it utilizes. The San Francisco-based startup received both the judge’s choice and audience choice awards for its Structure Launchpad presentation.
• GenieDB founder Dr. Jack Kreindler described how his company aims to solve large-scale distributed data problems with its geodiverse datafabric. The Orange County, Calif.-based startup has developed a datafabric that combines SQL and NoSQL for platform-as-a-service providers and cloud builders.
• PHP Fog founder and CEO Lucas Carlson talked about his Portland, Oregon-based company’s platform-as-a-service technology aimed at PHP developers. PHP Fog hopes to drastically reduce the time it takes for developers to build an application, potentially helping them save time and money upfront and system and scaling costs over time.
• Real-Status CEO Royce Murphy demonstrates his company’s modeling and visualization software product HyperGlance. The Cambridge, UK-based company purportedly helps companies visualize their experience in moving and hosting their data in the cloud.
• vCider CEO Chris Marino shows off his company’s on-demand distributed virtual switch product for the cloud. vCider works as a self-service overlay on top of existing networking structures.
• Zerto CEO Ziv Kedem launches the company out of stealth mode, announcing its technology for ensuring disaster recovery in the cloud. Zerto aims to help companies feel more comfortable with moving critical applications to the cloud by ensuring business continuity and disaster recovery by replicating data in a virtualized, hyper-visor layer.

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