Few weeks back, I wrote about Appistry Enterprise Application Fabric (EAF) which takes a collection of commodity servers and offers them as a single powerful virtualized resource. It helps enterprises achieve Google like reliable environment without the scale of Google. In the past couple of weeks, we have seen announcements regarding Amazon’s support for Windows in is EC2 instances and Microsoft’s planned release of its cloud OS, Windows Azure.

Today, Appistry pushed this game further with the announcement about adding support for Microsoft .NET framework in their EAF 3.9 version. Now it is possible to run .NET framework on commodity systems and add a layer of Appistry EAF to provide a highly scalable environment for .NET applications. This helps .NET developers to deploy their apps on the cloud without any need to recode them for the cloud.

The new features in the version 3.9 includes

• Expanded support for Microsoft .NET, including the ability to support Plain Old .NET Objects (PONOs) without modification
• Transparent .NET remoting which allows developers to remotely call methods on load-balanced objects deployed to the cloud
• Improved support for sharing .NET assemblies across multiple .NET-based fabric applications
• New asynchronous API calls for .NET Client
• Improved .NET Application Configuration
• An improved and simpler Appistry EAF Windows installer

The support for .NET framework is important for many reasons. First and foremost, this is going to help speed up enterprise adoption of cloud computing. We recently saw the release of VPN-Cubed by CohesiveFT. One of the biggest worries of enterprise customers with regards to cloud computing is the reality of outsourcing the control of security of their data to the cloud vendors. CohesiveFT solved this problem in a smart way by adding an additional layer of perimeter protection to the cloud and handing over the keys for this perimeter security to the enterprises themselves. Now, with the release of Appistry EAF for .NET framework, enterprises could port all their existing .NET apps to the cloud without the need for any massive recoding. Finally, an economic recession is in the horizon. Every IT department is going to face credit, oops, budget crunch. This is going to force IT departments to completely rethink how they do IT and Cloud Computing is waiting with their arms open for enterprises to embrace. We are done with talking about when the shift will happen. The shift has already begun and the announcements from Amazon, Microsoft, CohesiveFT, Appistry, etc. are just confirming the shift that is in motion.

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