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The startup, which launched in June, is seeking its Series A round and is currently bootstrapped by the three founders. The company employs seven people and offers Software as a Service (Saas) as well as on-premise deployments. Unlike some of the other configuration management or other cloud-provisioning and management tools out there, ComodIT is aimed squarely at the enterprise — although anyone else can use it too. The company offers identity management and compliance-related features that enterprise customers need, but has taken an API-reliant approach more familiar to the dev-ops community.

However, it is also built so that other tools can easily integrate with it, meaning customers can bring their own cloud tools with features ComodIT doesn’t have. It even posted the code for Synapse, the software that governs its agent, which helps track virtual instances and other IT assets the ComodIT platform controls on GitHub earlier this month.

ComodIT will compete against clusters of open-source software as well as IT management software from established vendors like RightScale and giants such as CA, but it’s worth watching because it’s trying to bridge multiple clouds with its software. If it succeeds it could essentially wrap all available clouds into a user-friendly Platform as a Service (PaaS) with enterprise levels of control.

ComodIT is one of five finalists in our Structure: Europe Launchpad competition, which will take place on October 16th in Amsterdam. More information can be found here.

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Stephen Herrod - CTO, VMware at Mobilize 2011

For a platform as a service, it’s no longer enough to support all the major languages and development frameworks, it must now also run across all the major cloud platforms.

That’s the rationale behind CloudFoundry’s new open-source BOSH management process, which should make it easier to deploy VMware’s PaaS across multiple clouds and on the biggest clouds.

BOSH ”is a Google-style solution for a Google-style problem,” VMware CTO Stephen Herrod told attendees of an event commemorating CloudFoundry’s first birthday Wednesday.

According to VMware’s web site, BOSH is “an open source tool chain for release engineering, deployment and lifecycle management of large scale distributed services.” As such it is for “serious devops guys who can deal with a command line interface, understand what YAML is , can read an IP address,” Mark Lucovksy, VMware VP of engineering, told attendees. Details about BOSH are posted to Github.

“We preach continuous improvement, iterative development. There are rough edges, but they’re the type of rough edges these guys demand,” he added.

BOSH as service providers’ best friend

The process should come in handy for service providers who want to host CloudFoundry, VMware co-president Tod Nielsen said in an interview late Wednesday.  ”It lets people easily manage life-cycle roll-outs, updates, it’s all about the engine room operations. The developer doesn’t care,  but if you run a cloud service, your life just gets easier because you’re not going to have to write your own crazy Puppet and Chef scripts,” Nielsen said.

The CloudFoundry event seemed about  proving that VMware, which built its business on proprietary, commercial technology, is a good open source citizen now. Nielsen said the company’s purchase of SpringSource in 2009, its subsequent handling of that franchise, and the way it’s run CloudFoundry should allay any concerns. ”People thought we would tightly couple CloudFoundry to vSphere as a service and what happened is you can run CloudFoundry on vSPhere but you can also run it on Amazon and other infrastructure,” he said.

Companies go multi-cloud

It makes sense to be cloud agnostic. Since some highly publicized outages, many companies hesitate to  trust their entire cloud computing load on a single cloud provider.

VMware really wants CloudFoundry to be, as Herrod put it, the “Linux of cloud,” abstracting out differences between underlying IaaS structures so developers don’t have to worry about it. Just as Linux runs on all the major server platforms, CloudFoundry and its primary competitors must run on all the major clouds.

Going back a year, most PaaS vendors raced to support all the major programming languages and development frameworks. Now it looks like supporting all the major clouds is the new table stakes.

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Chef is part of a new generation of IT.

Opscode, the configuration management company that has rethought the way to deploy and monitor hardware and software for cloud environments, has emerged from beta and launched a product specifically for the enterprise. The first was an expected move, but the second was because of popular (and surprising) demand, said Opscode co-founder and CEO Jesse Robbins in an interview.

The company, which makes the Chef configuration management software, launched last year with about 80 so-called “cookbooks” that are code-already-written to describe how the underlying infrastructure should operate. Now Robbins says there are more than 240 cookbooks, and most are contributed by the community. Chef also got a boost as the underlying configuration tool for Dell’s software to automatically deploy OpenStack-based clouds. Robbins hopes Chef becomes the default for OpenStack deployments in general, with those deciding to offer specialty distributions adding features at the layer above Opscode’s Chef.

And the OpenStack deployment and acceptance by Dell is part of a bigger strategy shift for Opscode. When Robbins launched the company, he envisioned developers playing with it and building out their startups using Chef. Some have. However, enterprises were also eager to kick the tires and try Chef out, leading Opscode to launch an enterprise edition today with a 99.9 percent availability guarantee and some support features.

Robbins said that most enterprise users aren’t deploying Chef for specific applications or workloads, but they are generally working on a project where they “have a license to rip s*** up.” It may be a new deployment of an internal or external app or a rewrite of an existing application, but those turning to Chef and the cloud generally have implicit or explicit permission to go around the old rules. And once people inside the enterprise see how fast and agile a specific department becomes, it’s hard for others to justify not following suit.

Thus Opscode gussied itself up for the enterprise with the service level agreements, as well as a more secure offering called Opscode Private Chef that can run behind the corporate firewall. Robbins also said he had to learn how to talk “enterprisey” in order to sell to this audience and has hired folks who know how to do it better.

Opscode competes against other configuration management tools, of which there are plenty, notably Puppet, which is shepherded by Puppet Labs (see disclosure). But so far, Robbins is optimistic and hopes that as time passes he finds fewer and not more clients willing to share testimonials for the company.

“Once they start using our automation, a really amazing thing happens: They stop talking about it,” Robbins says. “The way you can tell you are a good infrastructure company is when you disappear and just become part of the stack.”

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, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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There are plenty of details on tools and software that Twitter is using, ranging from Kestrel to Murder and Loony for the hardcore operations people out there, and some insights for business people as well, such as the slide declaring “Disk is the new Tape,” offering the insight that Web 2.0 isn’t possible without RAM, thanks to the need for instant response times as perceived by the end user. But because Flash and RAM are expensive, Twitter gets around this somewhat by using caching, using its Gizzard sharding technology for scaling MySQL data stores across multiple servers and a decision to kill queries that slow down the system. For those who want to skip the highlights, they’re taken form the final slide as seen on the right.

The full presentation is below and here’s link back to our coverage of Adam’s presentation on scaling from the first Chirp conference back in 2010. Enjoy!

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Eucalyptus. Ostatic broke the news about UC Santa Barbara’s open-source cloud project last year. Released as an open-source (under a FreeBSD-style license) infrastructure for cloud computing on clusters that duplicates the functionality of Amazon’s EC2, Eucalyptus directly uses the Amazon command-line tools. Startup Eucalyptus Systems was launched this year with venture funding, and the staff includes original architects from the Eucalyptus project. The company recently released its first major update to the software framework, which is also powering the cloud computing features in the new version of Ubuntu Linux.

Red Hat’s Cloud. Linux-focused open-source player Red Hat has been rapidly expanding its focus on cloud computing. At the end of July, Red Hat held its Open Source Cloud Computing Forum, which included a large number of presentations from movers and shakers focused on open-source cloud initiatives. You can find free webcasts for all the presentations here. The speakers include Rich Wolski (CTO of Eucalyptus Systems), Brian Stevens (CTO of Red Hat), and Mike Olson (CEO of Cloudera). Stevens’ webcast can bring you up to speed on Red Hat’s cloud strategy. Novell is also an open source-focused company that is increasingly focused on cloud computing, and you can read about its strategy here.

Traffic Server. Yahoo this week moved its open-source cloud computing initiatives up a notch with the donation of its Traffic Server product to the Apache Software Foundation. Traffic Server is used in-house at Yahoo to manage its own traffic, and it enables session management, authentication, configuration management, load balancing, and routing for entire cloud computing software stacks. Acting as an overlay to raw cloud computing services, Traffic Server allows IT administrators to allocate resources, including handling thousands of virtualized services concurrently.

Cloudera. The open-source Hadoop software framework is increasingly used in cloud computing deployments due to its flexibility with cluster-based, data-intensive queries and other tasks. It’s overseen by the Apache Software Foundation, and Yahoo has its own time-tested Hadoop distribution. Cloudera is a promising startup focused on providing commercial support for Hadoop. You can read much more about Cloudera here.

Puppet. Virtual servers are on the rise in cloud computing deployments, and Reductive Labs’ open-source software, built upon the legacy of the Cfengine system, is hugely respected by many system administrators for managing them. You can use it to manage large numbers of systems or virtual machines through automated routines, without having to do a lot of complex scripting.

Enomaly. The company’s Elastic Computing Platform (ECP) has its roots in widely used Enomalism open-source provisioning and management software, designed to take much of the complexity out of starting a cloud infrastructure. ECP is a programmable virtual cloud computing infrastructure for small, medium and large businesses, and you can read much more about it here.

Joyent. In January of this year, Joyent purchased Reasonably Smart, a fledgling open-source cloud startup based on JavaScript and Git. Joyent’s cloud hosting infrastructure and cloud management software incorporate many open-source tools for public and private clouds.  The company can also help you optimize a speedy implementation of the open-source MySQL database for cloud use.

Zoho. Many people use Zoho’s huge suite of free, online applications, which is competitive with Google Docs. What lots of folks don’t realize, though, is that Zoho’s core is completely open source — a shining example of how SaaS solutions can work in harmony with open source. You can find many details on how Zoho deploys open-source tools in this interview.

Globus Nimbus. This open-source toolkit allows businesses to turn clusters into Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. The Amazon EC2 interface is carried over, but is not the only interface you can choose.

Reservoir. This is the main European research initiative on virtualized infrastructures and cloud computing. It’s a far-reaching project targeted to develop open-source technology for cloud computing, and help businesses avoid vendor lock-in.

OpenNebula. The OpenNebula VM Manager is a core component of Reservoir. It’s an open-source answer to the many virtual machine management offerings from proprietary players, and interfaces easily with cloud infrastructure tools and services. “OpenNebula is an open-source virtual infrastructure engine that enables the dynamic deployment and re-placement of virtual machines on a pool of physical resources,” according to project leads.

It’s good to see open-source tools and resources competing in the cloud computing space. The end result should be more flexibility for organizations that want to customize their approaches. Open-source cloud offerings also have the potential to keep pricing for all competitive services on a level playing field.

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