Picture Credit: BrooklynCentral@Github
Cloudsoft Corporation, UK based consulting company turned multi cloud application management provider, today announced that they are open sourcing Brooklyn multi-cloud application management platform under Apache license. In short, Brooklyn is an autonomic policy driven control plane for distributed applications. Seeing it from another angle, it can also be seen as a DIY PaaS platform. This announcement is very interesting for me from many different aspects. Let me explain why in this post. If you want to learn more about the news, please read this news release.
What is Brooklyn?
Brooklyn is a library that vastly simplifies application deployment and management across distributed systems. It taps into Apache Whirr and jClouds for deployment across multiple clouds and offers a management plane that will make business policy driven deployment of applications and, eventually, ensuring that the application runs optimally as you intend it to be. The inbuilt autonomic management makes it easy to intelligently optimize applications across available machines, locations and clouds. In short, it is DevOps nirvana without getting the hands dirty. The developers get the abstraction offered by PaaS while having a seamless interface to manage the nitty gritty operational aspects. The fact that Cloudsoft is releasing this under an open source license makes the future of PaaS bright and brings the intelligent platform model I have been pushing in this space closer to reality.
With Brooklyn, developers can write application code using any middleware components, describe the application in the Brooklyn control plane, attach the necessary policies and constraints, pick up popcorn and watch magic happens. It is as simple as that.
Why Brooklyn is interesting for me?
Brooklyn is interesting from many different angles:
- Open Source: It is released under Apache license, one of the most permissive open source licenses. I don’t have to explain the impact of this move.
- Federated Clouds: I am a strong proponent of federated clouds as an antidote to both vendor lock-in and market monopoly. But one of the biggest push backs against the federated cloud idea is the complexity associated with application deployment and management. Some of the PaaS providers are taking the necessary steps to avoid this lock-in with their multi-cloud strategy. Since Brooklyn uses jCloud, the multi-cloud strategy is even more powerful as the apps can be deployed on more cloud providers and platforms.
- Next-gen PaaS: Regular readers of this blog know about the next generation intelligent platform model. Brooklyn is a pretty versatile framework that could fit around the data as a service component and offer the necessary platform framework needed for the intelligent platforms. In other words, I see Brooklyn as one of the ways in which such platforms can be realized in the near future.
Essentially, this announcement is solid development in the platform services market and this is going to accelerate enterprise adoption of PaaS, especially for building next generation of applications around big data. It leverages DevOps while greatly reducing the complexities associated with such an approach. If you are closely watching the platform space, keep a tab on Brooklyn project.
Krishnan
I think that it would be worth noting that this is part of a general trend toward a more open PaaS and the combination of DevOps and PaaS as i noted on my post here:
http://natishalom.typepad.com/nati_shaloms_blog/2012/01/there-are-currently-two-main-approaches-for-developing-and-managing-application-in-the-cloudpaas-paas-takes-a-developer-ap.html
Interestingly enough CloudStack is now under Apache 2.0 license
Thanks Nati. Yes, I saw that article. In fact, I was thinking about what Giga Spaces are doing while writing this post.