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.
