HP Public Cloud has Catalog to Guide Choice and Deployment

HP may not be the world’s biggest cloud player, but it still has a rather massive footprint in the sky. And its burgeoning OpenStack-based HP Public Cloud just got easier to navigate with the help of GigaSpaces, which this week unveiled the Cloudify Application Catalog.

GigaSpaces, a middleware company operating out of Israel, launched Cloudify as an open source PaaS last year. The PaaS runs on top of existing IaaS systems, which are on a lower rung of the cloud stack than PaaS. The idea of Cloudify is, as the name implies, a way to take existing on-premises apps and “cloudify” them to run on OpenStack. Once migrated, Cloudify helps them run more efficiently through orchestration, load balancing and monitoring.

The new catalog takes this all a step further.

“The Cloudify Application Catalog enables hassle-free, single-click deployment of open source solutions on HP’s OpenStack-based public cloud. Together, HP Public Cloud and GigaSpaces provide a Web service that makes the experience of testing and deploying even the most complex, multi-tier, big data applications, as simple as playing a video on YouTube,” GigaSpaces argued. 

The catalog lets developers test applications well before cloud deployment, and supports environments such as Cassandra, NodeJS and MySQL.

“Quite often the tools that we use when we try new software are quite different from the tools we use to manage that software in production. This creates friction during the transition from initial trial stages through development and into production, given that with each stage we would need to switch to a completely different environment," said Nati Shalom, CTO and Co-Founder of GigaSpaces Technologies. "Together with HP Public Cloud, we provide a frictionless experience through those stages, providing a simple, single-click experience, using one set of tools during the entire process. The Cloudify Application Catalog offers a completely new experience for the way applications are deployed, managed and shared, which resembles the way we manage other media items such as pictures, videos, and songs."

Cloudify and DevOps

PaaS, by simplifying the entire development process, can revolutionize the way many corporate IT factions work together. In fact, it can bring developers and operation teams closer together, creating more of a DevOps approach. This is because the developers no longer have to rely on others in IT to procure, set up and manage infrastructure.

 Without all this infrastructure grunt work, operations and developers spend more of their time on what’s really important – building software and keeping operations running smoothly.