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NodeFly goal: better app performance monitoring for Node.js

Barb Darrow — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 21:30:21 +0000

The use of Node.js to build web applications is growing like gangbusters, so it’s time it had a big-boy application performance monitoring tool. And that’s what NodeFly Systems says it’s bringing to the table. Node. js is a server-side, event-driven programming language popular among developers — especially JavaScript developers because it lets them use their existing skills to write server as well as client code.

Phenomenal growth rate aside, Node.js “doesn’t have a ton of great monitoring tools, and as the ecosystem matures, enterprises need these kinds of tools to look at all the layers of software,” Glen Lougheed, CEO of the Vancouver, BC-based startup told me. “We’re trying to provide devops with the visibility they need to understand what’s happening with their applications — there’s really no great user-friendly tools for that.”

Admittedly, there are some good one-off tools that Node.js devotees have open-sourced. To get to a full APM system, though, developers would need to “Frankenstein a solution together and most people don’t want to do that,” Lougheed said. Businesses are in the market for a more polished and integrated monitoring suite, he said.

NodeFly just put its APM solution — built from the ground up for Node.js specifically — into open beta so developers can try it out. Other APM suites support multiple languages but may not offer the best full-on support for Node.js itself, NodeFly said. New Relic is working on a Node.js agent that could compete with NodeFly.

In other news, NodeFly this week netted $800,000 in seed money from some pretty choice backers including Issac Roth, the man behind the Makara Platform as a Service, which has morphed into Red Hat OpenShift. Roth also spent time at Wily Technology, a leading APM provider acquired by CA — so he knows the market.

Shasta Ventures led the funding round which also netted contributions from Irfhan Rajani of Appneta, Paul Rochester of Sun Microsystems and Layer 7, and Dimitri Sirota, also of Layer 7.

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Load testing? Try to take down your app for $1 with blitz.io

Stacey Higginbotham — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 21:05:01 +0000

Step right up to test your app!

No, this isn’t some kind of carnival pitch. It’s a new product offering from Mu Dynamics called blitz.io that allows developers building in the cloud to load test their apps for as little as a buck. With blitz.io Mu Dynamics, which has a product for ISPs that shows them how 1 million people downloading Netflix or playing FarmVille might affect their networks, is branching out into the cloud sector.

Kowsik Guruswamy, the CTO of Mu Dynamics, said today that the company realized there was an opportunity to take what it calls its blitz infrastructure used to test how apps will affect ISPs’ networks and offer load testing for developers building in the cloud. For a detailed look at how Mu built the blitz platform, check out Guruswamy’s post here. Friday, Mu said it could offer developers an hour of testing time on the Heroku platform for just $1. (It has other pricing plans as well.)

So now, developers using the Heroku or Red Hat Platforms-as-a-Service can deploy their apps and use Blitz.io to terrorize them with hits to see how well they scale. Developers get back results that tell them how many hits their app can handle. And because this is a simple and cheap test to run, they can do it as often as they want, trying it out after they upload new code or just running it over and over again as the develop tries to optimize an aspect of the application.

Calling the current way of building apps for the web or mobile devices one of “continuous deployment, Guruswamy says the iterative (and cheap) approach offered by the Blitz platform works with the way people are building out apps. It used to take six months to build an app and a month to test it, but that’s not as relevant to an entirely new crop of developers that are building on various clouds. It’s a point emphasized by the emergence of several startups such as Parse or Kinvey that are offering a variety of back-end or development services to speed up the process of building out new mobile apps or web services.

And for those thinking how it might be awesome to prank your fellow Y Combinator buddies by spending a buck to test out their app on the sly, Guruswamy says the company makes you prove the app you want to load test belongs to you. He expects to launch service for new platforms on an ongoing basis, so if your PaaS isn’t there yet, it may be soon.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Loozrboy.

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AppFog lands $8M for PHP Cloud

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 04:01:26 +0000

Lucas Carlson, CEO AppFog

AppFog, the company formerly known as PHP Fog, has raised $8 million in a healthy second round of funding for the year-old company. The company’s name change coincides with the funding, and gives a clue as to where the platform as a service provider is heading. AppFog began as a PHP-focused platform where developers could build and rapidly deploy applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure: a popular market for companies large and small.

The round was led by Ignition Partners, with participation from new investors Simon Crosby (founder of Xen) and Matt Ocko, with previous investors Madrona Venture Group, First Round Capital and Founders Co-Op participating. This brings the company’s total funding to $9.8 million, and AppFog will use the funding to support more frameworks and languages, and to increase the development team working on AppFog, the technology that powers PHP Fog. Lucas Carlson, the company’s CEO said in a release that AppFog would soon support “Node, Ruby, Python, Java, .NET, and more.”

AppFog has nearly 20,000 application developers who have created and deployed approximately 10,000 applications using its platform. It’s also had to mature quickly. Since its founding, larger companies made big bets in the PaaS space, with Salesforce.com buying Ruby platform Heroku, RedHat snapping up Makara and VMware announcing an open-source platform supporting multiple languages called Cloud Foundry. Carlson also had to deal with getting hacked by a teenager. As for the AppFog security today, he emailed me to say:

We have worked with a great security firm, Cigital, to do a very deep audit of not only the PHP layer but the entire infrastructure top to bottom. We have created very thick barriers between our customers as well as removing all unnecessary connections between the servers. Also, when the hack happened, we had about 1/10th of the number of users we have now, and many new hack attempts have been tried and failed.

With this funding round, Carlson and AppFog has the means to keep building out a business that’s appealing to developers in a space that appeals to big acquirers. For more on AppFog, check out Carlson launching the company earlier this year at our Structure 2011 conference.

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3 PaaS lessons from CloudBees’ funding

Derrick Harris — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 18:41:12 +0000

I’ve been following Java-centric Platform-as-a-Service startup CloudBees for a while now, so I wasn’t too surprised when I learned it had closed a $10.5 million Series B funding round. PaaS is a white-hot space in terms of developer and VC interest, but it’s also very competitive. Thus far, however, CloudBees has demonstrated an impressive strategy for differentiation.

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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Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 07:01:55 +0000

Big data and Platform-as-a-Service offerings highlighted the second quarter, suggesting that we can expect to see a shift in enterprise IT practices around application development and analytics very soon. On the PaaS front, we saw new projects like DotCloud and Cloud Foundry gain incredible momentum in just a few short months. The big-data activity ranged from major new Hadoop vendors to heavy investment in flash storage that will speed the serving of data to processing engines. In other areas, we saw an uptick in cloud-computing plans from large vendors, OpenStack continued to mature and pick up both contributors and users, and Facebook caught our eye by launching an open-source project around the designs for its specialized servers and data centers. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Salesforce.com, IBM, Heroku and Calxeda. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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A field guide to cloud computing: current trends, future opportunities

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 17:30:33 +0000

Cloud computing has grown from a pie-in-the-sky vision to a major IT movement over the past few years. As its promise has grown, though, so too has its scope. This report covers six key sectors in cloud computing: commodity Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), enterprise IaaS, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), cloud storage and private clouds. We highlight the current state of each and provide informed insights into where they — and cloud computing in general — are headed. Much like any market in a still-evolving state, the infrastructure of the cloud-computing transition is still being built by startups, practitioners and even a big-name company or two. Companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Amazon, Nasuni, Terremark and Heroku. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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Red Hat Launches IaaS, PaaS Cloud Offerings

Derrick Harris — Wed, 04 May 2011 16:23:17 +0000

Updated: Red Hat today is launching two new cloud computing offerings, infrastructure-as-a-service software called CloudForms and platform-as-a-service software called OpenShift.

CloudForms helps users configure, deploy and manage virtual resources whether based on-premise or in the cloud, and OpenShift is Red Hat’s incarnation of the Makara technology that it bought it November. It comes in three versions — Express, Flex and Power — and can run atop public or private cloud resources. The new offerings will be critical to Red Hat’s goal of competing with Microsoft and VMware as a major software vendor for the cloud computing era.

Update:The news is officially being announced later today at the Red Hat Summit, but some information is already up on the Red Hat site. I’ll have more information later today after a call with Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens and will update this post accordingly. During a press conference today, Issac Roth, Makara founder and current direct of cloud product marketing at Red Hat, noted that Red Hat plans to open source OpenShift at some point, but that there is no specific timeline yet. Presumably, this will be after the product, which currently is available as a developer preview, has been worked out by beta users and is fine-tuned a bit more. OpenShift supports Java, Python, PHP and Ruby applications, including framework support for Spring, Seam, Weld, CDI, Rails, Rack, Symfony, Zend Framework, Twisted, Django and Java EE.

Red Hat has formed a strong ecosystem around OpenShift, which includes NoSQL vendors Couchbase and 10gen, cloud provider OpSource, database vendor EnterpriseDB and web-development platform eXo, among others. BMC Software also is part of the CloudForms ecosystem and will be partnering with Red Hat on a cloud lifecycle management product.

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Get Purchased or Perish: The Harsh Reality of Cloud Platforms

Derrick Harris — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 21:31:01 +0000

It’s getting hard out there for startups in the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) space that have to compete increasingly with large vendors, and today’s news that VMware is launching its Cloud Foundry PaaS offering just made life more difficult. It’s an uphill battle, because large software vendors realize they must embrace the future of application development in the cloud or risk becoming relics of the past, and many are choosing the former.

Names like Heroku, Makara and Cloud Foundry still exist in the PaaS world, but they’re now attached to Salesforce.com, Red Hat and VMware, respectively. Elsewhere, Microsoft (Windows Azure), Amazon Web Services (Elastic Beanstalk) and HP (it claims) are all pushing their own PaaS efforts, and IBM and Oracle can’t be far behind. Depending on how you look at it, it’s either a really good time or a really bad time to be a PaaS startup.

Earlier this week, I had a conversation with Issac Roth, former Makara co-founder and CEO, and current director of cloud product marketing at Red Hat, who suggested that PaaS is pretty much an acquisition-or-perish market at this point. Roth didn’t always see the world this way, but his experience since Red Hat bought Makara in November has changed his worldview. Some people thought Makara would die inside of Red Hat, he explained, but his reality has been quite the opposite.

Roth is still driving Makara development within Red Hat, and the company is planning to release the details of its forthcoming PaaS offering at its user conference in May. Further, he noted, Red Hat “is putting a ton of resources behind this, and Red Hat isn’t nearly as big as Microsoft.” The suggestion, of course, is that Microsoft is putting even more money into its Windows Azure platform, a very real possibility given its Microsoft’s recent pledge to invest $8.6 billion on cloud computing R&D this year. Red Hat is operating at a billion-dollar run rate for 2011, and CEO Jim Whitehurst has explained to me on multiple occasions how seriously it takes its cloud computing business as a driver of future revenue. A serious monetary investment is crucial, he explained, because developing enterprise-grade PaaS offerings is hard work that requires serious resources of the amount that only large vendors can afford.

For example, although auto-scaling gets a lot of attention — and rightly so — that feature alone doesn’t make a PaaS offering. PaaS providers need to work on a variety of capabilities and features, Roth explained, including isolation, capacity management and scheduling, and if they don’t have a large vendor’s existing tools to leverage or the research funds to create their own, the only option is to integrate open source projects and hope they’re production-ready. It’s not cheap to run a public PaaS service, either, he added, when developers want low-cost product but PaaS providers still need to pay their IaaS providers at the month’s end. Red Hat can leverage its certified cloud partners; Microsoft, IBM, VMware and others can leverage their own data centers. “How can a little company differentiate and keep up?” he asked.

From what I can tell, Roth’s experience with Red Hat isn’t unique. Heroku CEO Byron Sebastian has told me that life has been great since his company became part of Salesforce.com, and the latter’s reputation already has opened up new doors for Heroku in terms of big-time customers and partners. I think the Cloud Foundry team — which was acquired by SpringSource right before VMware bought SpringSource — would tell of a similar experience as part of VMware. The product certainly has received a much-needed facelift.

Homegrown PaaS appears to be doing just fine, too. Microsoft is wooing some very big customers to its Windows Azure platform — including, recently, Toyota — and although AWS doesn’t disclose any numbers, it’s safe to assume its free Elastic Beanstalk service is doing just fine among Amazon EC2 users. It will be even better when AWS incorporates support for additional languages beyond Java, including Ruby support via a partnership with Engine Yard.

What this all means for PaaS startups like DotCloud, PHP Fog, CloudBees and others (although not RightScale, which actually might have a broad-enough business model and customer base to remain independent if it so pleases) is that if they’re not already fielding acquisition offers, they should expect to be doing so soon as the remaining software giants gets their PaaS acts together. If the phone never rings, it might be time for some self-reflection on whether the platform is viable in the face of all those deep-pocketed competitors.

Image courtesy of Ross.

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VMware Launches Open-Source Cloud

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 16:05:23 +0000

VMware has entered the cloud game by offering an open-source package called Cloud Foundry, a Platform-as-a-Service that should strike fear in the hearts of its competitors, especially the likes of Salesforce.com, Microsoft and Rackspace. The platform will offer developers the tools to build out applications on public clouds, private clouds and anyplace else, whether the underlying server runs VMware or not. Like last week’s Open Compute Project from Facebook or Rackspace’s OpenStack effort, Cloud Foundry is a pretty big deal.

So What Exactly Is Cloud Foundry?

The goal of Cloud Foundry is to hide complexity from developers and make it easy to deploy and run applications anywhere. This is the same marketing speak that folks toting the cloud have pitched for years, but VMware wants to make it even more simple. Instead of worrying about instances or how to support a database, you just write a few lines of code, and Cloud Foundry makes it all happen for you. From day one, the platform will support Java thanks to VMware’s SpringSource buy back in 2009, Sinatra, Rails and node.js. However those wanting more frameworks and languages can build them, since the product is open-source.

Roger Bodamer, EVP Products and Technology at 10Gen – which supports the MongoDB NoSQL database — says it took about three months to integrate MongoDB with Cloud Foundry. 10gen is one of several launch partners that include RightScale, Joyent and Pivotal Labs.

VMware’s service has three components, illustrated by the nifty little slide above. The platform (what is called the “cloud provider interface”) can be a public cloud, such as Amazon’s EC2; a private cloud running VMware or other software; the actual Cloud Foundry platform; or what VMware calls a downloadable microcloud, which is basically a developer sandbox that looks like the Cloud Foundry platform running on a server or computer and synchs back up to any of the clouds.

The application services are items such as the existing MongoDB service already built-in, RabbitMQ messaging services, Redis, MySQL and Postgres for data, and others to come as programmers want to build it out. The shift toward open source is significant, because it runs somewhat counter to VMware’s roots, but it also shows how influential the open source world is on the cloud.

Charles Fitzgerald, a platform strategist for VMware, said in a conversation with me last Thursday, ”Open source is the price of entry in the cloud world today.” So VMware will offer Cloud Foundry as a paid, supported product for customers as well as provide the underlying code so developers can build their own. The product will open for an invite-only beta in stages, with the commercial support beta coming in the second half of this year.

Who Gets Hurt

Charles Fitzgerald says Cloud Foundry will sit on top of platform plays such as OpenStack, but in truth, it’s likely to hurt that effort by obviating the need for enterprises and other developers to worry about the underlying infrastructure platform. For those who want to build out an app, electing to deploy using Cloud Foundry means the developer can choose where to host an app without ever caring if it’s using OpenStack.

Fitzgerald claims the big victim with this move will be middleware providers such as IBM, which have multi-billion businesses helping connect information in huge enterprises. While he’s aware the ~~licensing~~ support revenue for open-source software can be a tenth of the original value of the software, he says, “It’s new revenue to us and old revenue to them, and a billion looks pretty good to us.”

However the most immediate victims may well be the existing PaaS players such as Salesforce.com, Google and a string of startups that have been building out products in this space around specific languages. Salesforce, which works with VMware in a joint PaaS called VMforce, suddenly has some serious competition that can interoperate with apps on the Salesforce.com platform as well as any others. VMforce will still exist, but now it looks like a walled garden.

And the smaller players, such as PHP Fog; Red Hat (srht), which purchased Makara; and EngineYard, all suddenly have a multi-billion competitor that has the potential to be all clouds to all comers. Even configuration management as a service startups might see some business erode as apps hosted in a PaaS have less need for those services.

VMware’s Constant Search for Reinvention

Fitzgerald talked a lot about openness and eliminating the hurdles for developers, but this move is yet another continuation of VMware’s willingness to throw its businesses under the bus as the world of cloud computing evolves. VMware recognizes that openness is the key for delivering cloud services and that interoperability will matter to more and more companies, especially those forming today.

While the PaaS market isn’t huge at the moment, it’s clearly an area of interest with Amazon adding Elastic Beanstalk — its own PaaS product — as well as Salesforce.com talking up its Heroku buy and PaaS capabilities. Fitzgerald acknowledged that it’s early days, but says, “It’s very early and part of that is the limitations of the solutions and that are out there, so we can really make it mainsteam and legitimize it.” Flexibility is the biggest selling factor behind the cloud and with this offering that’s what VMware wants to offer. It’s pretty compelling.

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Big Data, ARM and Legal Troubles Transformed Infrastructure in Q4

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 08:00:26 +0000

Some might call this past quarter in the infrastructure space transformative. The rise of ARM-based processing suggests the days of x86 dominance might be coming to an end, while the Amazon Web Services-WikiLeaks controversy cast new light on the legal aspects of cloud computing. Big data got bigger, meanwhile, as the Hadoop ecosystem expanded, and amid all these cutting-edge technologies, two archaic topics — Novell and Java — proved they aren’t going anywhere soon. Companies mentioned in this report include Intel, AMD, Amazon Web Services, IBM, Yahoo, Appistry, VMware, Joyent and Microsoft. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.