As Dekel has already written on his blog, we are releasing our cloud framework for private beta. This was intended as a very "soft launch" sent to about 30 customers and partners already using GigaSpaces on public clouds (such as EC2, GoGrid, Joyent and Flexiscale) to help us test it out and provide feedback on how we can improve it.
But given that James Urquhart and a couple of others have already given it some more exposure, I might as well give some more public details about it.
First, let me clarify that GigaSpaces XAP, as is, is not only ready for the cloud now, but is already being used as a "cloud application server" on EC2 by several large and start-up companies. Even before the advent of public clouds, such as Amazon EC2, GigaSpaces was already being used by corporations in on-premise grids and by Web 2.0 start-ups for handling peak loads and the need to rapidly scale.
Because it allows on-demand scalability, provides transparent fault-tolerance, enables data affinity and is extremely high-performance, as a technology, GigaSpaces XAP is ideally suited for public cloud environments. But there were a few pieces missing in terms of the "customer experience" -- and we are working hard to provide them.
One of them was pricing suitable for the on-demand model. We had already taken care of that as part of the announcement of GigaSpaces availability on EC2 back in June by providing a pay-per-use pricing model (CPU/hour).
Another one was simplifying and automating the deployment of applications to a public cloud environment. That's what the "cloud framework" is about. It enables rapid cluster configuration and "one-click" deployment on public clouds through a Web interface. The current version supports EC2, but was built in a way that allows us to easily add other public clouds, which we will gradually implement. To learn more, see the documentation for the cloud framework.
If you are interested in or considering using GigaSpaces on EC2, if you are part of our Start-Up Program, or an existing "on-premise"customer, please let us know if you'd like to participate in the private beta (email cloud at gigaspaces.com). You'd first need to sign up for a GigaSpaces EC2 license.
The official public beta release of the cloud framework will be announced soon. Shortly thereafter I hope to announce tighter integration with our partners at RightScale, CohesiveFT and others. And there's more to come...
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