PaaS Is The Future Of Cloud Services: Cumulogic Goes Public Beta

Cumulogic, the first company to offer private PaaS solution, today announced that they are making their platform open to public in beta form. You can download Cumulogic platform from their website and run on public and private clouds. They offer a powerful Java PaaS supporting all the Java Frameworks including Spring. I have been talking to Cumulogic from their early days and I am pretty impressed with their platform. Once the IT department deploys their platform on a public or private cloud platform, the developers can just upload their war files and, boom, they have a easily scalable application running on the cloud. It is as simple as that.

First, some background on the PaaS space

Regular readers of this blog know that I am bullish on the future of PaaS. To me, it is the ultimate cloud nirvana where compute resources are tapped just like the utility model without worrying about the plumbing underneath. PaaS helps us move our thinking about computing away from chunks (VMs) to a more fluid model (utility model which made cloud attractive in the early stages). However, various concerns (some valid ones and others as a result of FUD unleashed by folks with traditional computing mindset) about cloud computing, in general, and PaaS, in particular, ensured that PaaS stayed mostly as a toy for individuals developers wanting to test out their applications or social media app shops wanting a low cost way to enter the market. Enterprise customers were not even looking at PaaS seriously. Then Cumulogic entered the fray with their PaaS for private cloud solution and Enterprise PaaS was fast becoming a reality. When VMware unveiled CloudFoundry, the space was completely disrupted and pundits started believing that enterprises will embrace PaaS sooner than later to build modern distributed applications.

Cumulogic’s Position In PaaS Market

Even though VMware’s CloudFoundry is on a strong footing, they are still in early stages when it comes to deploying in production environments at the enterprises. Cumulogic has, at least, one year advantage over them and some of the infrastructure management features are more matured than what I have seen with CloudFoundry. Having said that VMware has the necessary muscle to overcome this disadvantage in no time. We also have CloudBees roaring in the Java PaaS space. Such heavy competition is going to push all players, including Cumulogic, to innovate rapidly and stay ahead of the competition. This is a good thing to happen to users of PaaS, in general, and Java PaaS, in particular.

Some of the other advantages Cumulogic has over CloudFoundry include:

Support for legacy systems like IBM websphere and Oracle backends
Support for Java EE and other frameworks
Service catalog which I haven’t seen on CloudFoundry platform yet
Better support for legacy applications which are still part and parcel of enterprise IT (There is some criticism about CloudFoundry that they don’t support legacy applications. However, Derek Collison told me that they do provide hooks in their platform)
Even though CloudFoundry can work well with other cloud platforms, it doesn’t support them out of the box at this point of time. I am not sure if VMware will make it work seamlessly on cloud platforms like Cloud.com or OpenStack. However, since CloudFoundry is open source, anyone can make it run on top of these rival platforms. On the other hand, Cumulogic works with many public and private cloud platforms out of the box, with support for OpenStack coming soon

However, it should be noted that other players in the space like CloudFoundry and CloudBees can easily match (and have more) the features of Cumulogic platform, wiping out the above said advantages

Cumulogic Platform

Cumulogic platform offers modules necessary for

Infrastructure provisioning
Dynamic resource control
Granular access control
Autoscaling
In-built monitoring through agents
Application lifecycle management
backup

I saw the demo of both the IT admin interface and developer interface. IT admin gets the complete control he/she expects from a platform deployed in their organization and the developer gets an interface that completely abstracts away the complexities of the underlying infrastructure, taking the ops out of picture for them.

A RESTful interface allows application developers to control the application deployment services in the cloud and allows for integration with developer tools (Eclipse plugin) and continuous build integration environments (like Jenkins). One of the attractive features of Cumulogic platform is the cloud services catalog which lets developers choose the infrastructure from pre-integrated and tested infrastructure components. IT admins can add to this catalog from their admin dashboard, giving their developers the environment they need.

Conclusion

Cumulogic platform is one of the comprehensive PaaS solutions out there in the market. They have built their framework in such a way that they can add support for additional languages in the future. The fact that they offer out of the box support for many public cloud providers and private cloud platforms makes them very attractive for enterprise customers not using VMware or Microsoft environments. They will also be more palatable to service providers wanting to build their own PaaS offering because they are not in the game of offering hosted PaaS like VMware. They face heavy competition from the likes of CloudFoundry, CloudBees, OpenShift, etc.. But, from a buyer’s perspective, such competition is good because it keeps the innovation going and prices low.