Codenvy (formerly Exo IDE), a cloud environment for coding, building, and testing apps, today announced it has closed $9 million in Series A funding led by Toba Capital with Auriga Partners and a number of angel investors participating.

Codenvy has developed an independent developer environment that it claims is faster than developing on the desktop. It takes the local desktop workspace, which consists of the editor, builder, and tester runtimes and separates it logically from its underlying physical environment, and moves it into the cloud.

CEO Tyler Jewell said in an email interview that the workspace is divided into separate nodes that scale independently. Project files are synchronized between the nodes.

By having the three components co-located and fully integrated, Jewell said they can keep the latency of communications between the components minimal. This makes for an always on workspace that is very fast. The IDE is also optimized by multi-branch checkouts, continuous & incremental compilation/deployment and parallel computing. All combined, Jewell said that in many cases the cloud workspace is better performing than development on a desktop.

The service is complementary to continuous integration and platform as a service (PaaS) offerings.

Codenvy has about 50,000 registered developers using its platform and the largest selection of integrated partners including GitHub, RedHat Openshift,Google App Engine, Amazon Web Services BeanStalk, VMWare CloudFoundry, Heroku, AppFog, CloudBees and ZeroTurnaround.

I asked Jewell what differentiates the service. He gave five reasons:

1) The architecture is optimized for compiled languages such as Java.
2) The company has an on-premise version, Codenvy Enterprise, for organizations that want to bring centralized shared development behind their firewall.
3) Every facet of the system can be tailored, creating business development opportunities with software companies that require on-demand developer workspaces.
4) Engineers have backed the entire system with a Hadoop analytics system that mines insights to make developers more productive.
5) The company’s research and development office has 30 people, most of whom have worked together for nearly a decade. The team has been working on this project since 2009.

Jewell said Codenvy competes with any vendor that emphasizes building applications on a desktop. The focus is on the enterprise, which means that the company needs to specialize in compiled languages such as Java. Eclipse has the largest market share of Java development. Codenvy’s focus is in focusing most of its energies in finding ways to make developers be more productive in the cloud.

He said that Koding and Cloud9IDE are also cloud-based development environments, but both of them have a strong emphasis on interpreted languages like JavaScript, Ruby, and PHP. Jewell said nearly $30 million has been invested in the past year on companies that are trying to move development off of the desktop, validating that the time has arrived for cloud-based development.

Look at the desktop over the past 10 years and almost every app has already moved to the cloud, Jewell said. Developer workspaces are the last remaining holdout. The big issue is the data involved. Globally, data is doubling every 15 months. The number of applications to service this data must match pace.

While the developer population is growing globally, it’s not going to double every 15 months. The only answer is for developers to become more productive, and have larger portions of the app construction cycle be automated.

Codenvy’s greatest challenge is in fighting off the challengers in this fast evolving space. The difference for Codenvy is its speed and synchronization, which makes for a smooth development process.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

During the great Amazon Web Services outages of April 2011 and June 2012 many users were stuck. They could, in theory, move their apps to another AWS region, or to another cloud provider altogether. But in practice the architecture of AWS regions are unique – each one supports slightly different features and APIs.

The thing is, every cloud provider will eventually have some downtime. Quite possibly less downtime than your on-premise apps. But if you can’t wait it out, you’re going to need to architect your applications so that they can live in different environments. And today AppFog and Rackspace announced a partnership that promises to make it easier to do that. But there’s no word on when, so for now this is still vaporware.

AppFog is a platform cloud, like Heroku or Google App Engine, that supports several programming languages and frameworks. It’s based on the private platform-as-as-service software Cloud Foundry, which VMware open sourced last year. So far AppFog has only been available on AWS’ infrastructure, but CEO Lucas Carlson has been promising a one click migrate between clouds for a while now. What AppFog announced today is that its service would be available through the Rackspace Cloud Tools Marketplace. Its inclusion will bring the the platform-as-a-service marketplace I described last weekend a bit closer to reality.

Seamless app migrations between clouds is a tall order and I’ll believe it when I see it. But it would be a killer app for platform clouds, which so far have left many developers asking “What’s the point? I can configure all this stuff myself.” But AppFog’s not alone, the platform market is increasingly crowded. For example, just this week Uhuru, another Cloud Foundry based provider that adds-on .NET support to the core offering, launched its beta. Cross-cloud deployments are likely on the roadmaps of many, if not most, platform cloud companies.

If nothing else, hopefully this move will put some pressure on AWS to make it easier to fail-over to other regions.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The app store model, pioneered by companies like Handango and popularized by Apple, has become the preferred method for distributing software on everything from desktops to post-PC devices. We’re also seeing this model in the cloud, mostly through software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers, such as the Google Apps Marketplace. But what’s been missing so far is a platform-as-a-service that allows you to add components through an app store interface.

In the world of enterprise software, SaaS app markets are subverting the binary distinction between “best of breed” solutions that do one thing and do it well and large suites. It’s hard not to root for best of breed solutions. They are, after all, the best at what they do. But large enterprises have reasons for choosing bundles, ranging from integration to procurement issues. With an app store, you can standardize on a particular suite and then augment or replace specific features. For example, both Jive and Yammer are social collaboration suites that include idea management app, but both also include an app marketplace where you can install a competing idea management solution like Spigit or UserVoice.

We’ve yet to see this applied to PaaS, but I think it’s something we need. I recently moderated a panel on polyglot vs. single stack platform-as-as-service providers at DeployCon. Although there are clear benefits in choosing a PaaS provider fanatically devoted to a particular stack, the way Nodejitsu is devoted to Node.js, the general consensus of the panel was that the market is heading towards polyglot providers. There are just too many advantages in choosing a PaaS provider that give you a single place to multiple stacks with the same tools.

PaaS providers are trying a few ways to get out of the best of breed paradox. Engine Yard acquired Orchestra for its PHP PaaS instead of trying to build something in-house. Cloud Foundry and OpenShift are trying to get the open source community to create a best-of-breed implementation for each stack that it supports. But in the end the truly best implementations may be scattered across providers. Heroku, dotCloud and Active State Stackato may each end up with the best version of one component, but in the end you’ll probably have to pick just one provider.

That’s where an app store could come in handy. What if you could sign-up for a public PaaS and then choose among different components? What if you could actually add OpenShift’s Java stack and Nodejitsu’s Node.js stack to a Cloud Foundry PaaS with the click of a button? Not an integration with a separate PaaS instance, but as an actual component within your main PaaS, with support from a best-of-breed provider. I imagine developers competing to create the best architectures and configurations for stacks, and end users being able to pick the best ones. The primary PaaS provider would need to vet these for security and resource efficiency, of course, but it would turn the PaaS into more of a, well, platform.

There’s some evidence that something like this could happen. PHPFog already has a selection of “JumpStarts” for different applications and frameworks, such as WordPress, Drupal and Cake PHP. But AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson recently showed me Open JumpStarts, a forthcoming project which would allow third party developers to create and submit custom stacks for various frameworks and languages.

We may see this from Amazon Web Services soon enough. Elastic Beanstalk and AWS Marketplace provide the fundamental components. I could see Bitnami or CloudSmith getting into this market as well. You can even see the configuration repositories from Puppet Labs and Opscode as steps in this direction.

With an app store model, best-of-breed would become a realistic solution for platform-as-a-service and shake-up the existing support models.

Photo by Martin L / CC

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

AppFog is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider that wants to do for developer platforms what Google did for email.

GMail launched in 2004 by giving its users  a distributed service with 2 gigabytes (GB) of free disk space. Search made it possible. It disrupted competitors like Hotmail that provided a measly 2 mb of free space.

Today AppFog is offering 2 GB of RAM for free. It is the first PaaS provider to offer a  RAM based service that starts with such a large free amount. You can use the service as much as you want and never pay a dime until you use 2 GB.  Users get load balancing, multiple instance scaling and failover to different infrastructures  in case of problems. AppFog is available on Amazon Web Services, HP, Rackspace and Windows Azure.

Other service providers range in price from $58 per month up to $360 for 2 GB RAM.

This is AppFogs’s  attempt to commoditize PaaS in the same way Google commoditized email.

AppFog Founder and CEO Lucas Carlson said PaaS users are getting penalized for becoming active users. The Instagrams of the world are not using PaaS in part due to the cost that comes with the PaaS services. Reliability and performance issues further aggravates the problem.

Reliability issues have been a persistent problem for infrastructure providers such as Amazon Web Services. Users never know when a a disaster may affect service  or operations mistakes will be made. Interoperability is difficult betweeen vendors.

AppFog’s service extends across different infrastructure services. It does this by using CloudFoundry, VMware’s PaaS, as the universal API to multiple infrastructure environments. That allows the service to exist on any infrastructure without the complexity that usually burdens the customer.

For instance, pricing can get quite complex. Pricing calculators are the norm. Customers get confused as the contracts are different from the one they were accustomed to with their on-premise environments.

AppFog abstracts the complexity. Users do not have to have contracts with infrastructure providers. The RAM customers use can be subdivided among providers.

Google used its search to disrupt the old, file-based model of organizing data. Search replaced the file folder metaphor.

If AppFog has its way, RAM will be the new metaphor, replacing virtualization as the common way to calculate pricing and use of an infrastructure environment.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch