Apprenda 3.0 Enterprise PaaS for .NET Ships in a Free Downloaded Version 
Apprenda is offering a free downloadable version of its PaaS optimized for .NET deployments. Apprenda 3.0 helps IT tap into PaaS power by creating a middle tier fabric between applications and underlying server OS components. Apprenda Express runs on clusters with up to 12GBs of RAM.
Apprenda is offering a free downloadable version of its PaaS optimized for .NET deployments. Apprenda 3.0 helps IT tap into PaaS power by creating a middle tier fabric between applications and underlying server OS components. Apprenda Express runs on clusters with up to 12GBs of RAM.
Apprenda 3.0 provides an “application delivery fabric” designed to let IT transform its current infrastructure and application provisioning operations into a private self-service delivery model that speeds delivery of new applications and makes it easier to tune and optimize existing ones, Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuller told IDN.
“We give IT a private PaaS fabric that lets them deploy anything from simple apps and SOA apps to multi-tenant apps similar to Salesforce without the heavy lifting. It is a single-instance, multi-tenant runtime,” Schuller said.
Further, the Apprenda’s PaaS is also designed to make it easy to convert and migrate traditional non-cloud applications into a multi-tenant environment. “The dev doesn’t know or need to know what’s under the hood. They simply get full use of private PaaS without the need to [redo] any code,” Schuller added.
Some business-critical benefits of the Apprenda 3.0 PaaS approach include the ability to boost infrastructure utilization up to 10x, even beyond virtualization, remove the complexities of provisioning new apps and scaling out existing ones, and even automatic (or what Apprenda calls “zero-effort”) transition of existing apps to single-instance, multi-tenant apps.
Apprenda 3.0 lets enterprises take any Windows infrastructure and offer a self-service .NET cloud platform in a “plug-and-play” approach.
“The Apprenda application server model is different than the application management-centric models offered elsewhere in the PaaS market,” Schuller said. “With Apprenda, users have a run-time model that sits underneath applications as they execute. This abstracts away complexities and non-strategic details of provisioning and on-going resource management.”
In fact, the pain of such provisioning and management were the driving factors behind Apprenda, Schuller said. He got the idea for the Apprenda PaaS architecture while working in IT at Morgan Stanley.
“At Morgan Stanley, our team needed to build apps the investment bankers and accountants wanted, and depending on how complicated they were it might take anywhere from a couple of weeks to a year to build them,” Schuller told IDN. “But, even after they were built, it could take another 90 days or more just to get them deployed.”
Technical issues with building (or rebuilding) critical provisioning components and handling backlogs were often the main culprits for delays, he said. “This caused friction between IT and business, because the business users would know their app was done, but they still couldn’t use it,” Schuller said.
Other Apprenda 3.0 features and benefits include:
Centralized Web Service Management and Configuration: IT admins can activate or modify web services and SOA assets using a simple mouse click or drag-and-drop in Apprenda’s centralized service management. This console provides IT a browsable repository of all its deployed services, and also tracks dependencies and changes.
Manageability: Operations managers can fine tune which services of the PaaS are offered to specific developers. For example “slice policies” can be created for each individual application that allow for the management of resource limits and usages, and allow other resource-dependent apps to tap into needed capacity.
Developer Productivity: Developers can access complex architecture value through simple API calls to distributed caching, publish/subscribe systems, message brokering, and application metering.
Zero-Effort Multi-Tenancy: To bring application-level single-instance, multi-tenancy at all tiers with standard single-tenant web and SOA guest applications to support home-grown enterprise apps. Because Apprenda itself is multi-tenant, it aggregates all infrastructure components into one resource pool, and deals with sharing application and database servers between applications. This also avoids dedicating entire servers or VMs to single applications.
Inside Apprenda 3.0’s PaaS Architecture “Apprenda 3.0 takes virtualization a step further than most and focuses on the web app container,” Schuller told IDN. “So, one of our biggest differentiators from an IP perspective is that we treat application components themselves as first-class citizens.”
As a result, Apprenda’s middle tier breaks the tightly-coupled links between application and OS. Untying the application from the underlying OS – and instead using Apprenda as the mediator in between the two – allows the application more flexibility to configure and throttle applications, he said. The Apprenda layer identifies attributes of the application and OS components and creates new, more adaptable links between the two to speed, simplify and improve app provisioning, operations and management, Schuller added.
Sinclair Schuller, CEO, Apprenda
Under the covers, Apprenda 3.0 PaaS behaves just like an application server, running under the application layer. But, unlike an app server, Apprenda’s PaaS layer acts as an intelligent mediation layer between apps and multiple servers and their OS components – whether those servers are physical or virtualized servers.
This “middle tier” fabric, which lies in between applications and the servers (and their OS components), provides a smart mediation layer that can identify, access and even reuse components crucial to provisioning. These components include load balancers, caches, message brokers and more, Schuller said.
“Allowing new or existing applications to reuse core infrastructure components that the developer team has already built means developers don’t need to build them again at design-time,” Schuller said. Apprenda 3.0’s PaaS approach also means provisioning and operations professionals can simply tap into those resources to run or tune their applications, and avoid the requirement to build, test or re-provision them.
To on-ramp their apps and infrastructures to Apprenda, customers simply upload their compiled .NET applications to Apprenda. By loading the app up as a ZIP file similar to a WAR or EAR file in Java, Apprenda can analyze the binary content and build a meta model map of an application’s architecture. “In this way, we learn about how their applications are dependent and call the underlying components, and use that information on how to deploy the application onto the Apprenda layer,” Schuller said.
In turn, the Apprenda layer, which has specific routing and load balancing functions, can easily perform complex optimization operations (scaling, load balancing and even aggregating data across databases, as permissible by policy).
At present, Apprenda is focused on .NET backends, and the runtime comes with deep support for elements of the .NET stack, especially caching and message brokering.
Apprenda uses a container model, and doesn’t rely on libraries or component tooling. “We get installed on top of your Windows server base, and [create a middle layer] which stitches those .NET servers into a PaaS,” Schuller told IDN. “Apprenda places agents on each machine or virtual server, which work to assemble a seamless fabric. When an app gets deployed, it gets deployed onto Apprenda and we are the fabric that interfaces with the server [resources].” The Apprenda fabric provides and manages the interfaces between the application and the underlying OS resources, such as security, CPU and memory, and so on.
“Out of the box, you can have a single consolidated view, so you never talk to an individual server,” Schuller said.
Also out-of the-box, Apprenda has a core set of rules for address conformance and policy issues. “If an application using a certain library is blessed, we can enforce that,” he said. “Also, we have workflow extensions that can be customized to do things like kick off an approval.”
Apprenda Express is limited to 12GB of RAM across the cluster of systems managed by the product. Pricing for the full version of Apprenda is based on the amount of RAM in one’s managed cluster
Apprenda Express is available as a free download here
