GigaSpaces Brings Java to Azure

The last few months have seen a mass move from PaaS players to move from single language/framework to support to being all things to all peopple. From PHPFog renaming itself AppFog and adding new languages, to Heroku rolling out Java to CloudFoundry going Node.js, multi language is the way of the future it seems.

One player that had been a little absent during this discussion was Microsoft – that’s partly because Azure is a somewhat misunderstood beast, and perhaps also because Microsoft is prepared to wait for some of the attention around the new breed of PaaS players to wear off. Not prepared to sit and wait, GigaSpaces is today announcing the enablement of moving Java applications into Azure. The idea being that developers can move their Java applications to Azure without having to worry about code changes and the like. The GigaSpaces solution is offering;

• On-boarding of mission critical Enterprise Java/JEE/Spring applications to Windows Azure
• Continuous availability and failover, elastic scaling across the stack, and automating the application deployment lifecycle.
• Making Windows Azure services natively available to enterprise Java applications
• GigaSpaces Java in-memory data grid
• Control & visibility – Built-in application- and cluster-aware monitoring.
• Vendor neutrality

Available in Q4 this year, the integration will be attractive to enterprises with existing Java workloads that are looking to gain the flexibility and cost benefits of Azure. Deployment is really simple;

1. Prepare a Recipe – A recipe is an execution plan that automates configuration, deployment, monitoring  and scaling of your entire application stack. Cloudify recipes can automate any stack, and require zero changes to your application code. Common Java stacks, such as Spring, Tomcat, and AzureSQL have pre-prepared recipes built in
2. Deploy the Recipe

A single shell command deploys the recipe to the Cloudify manager where the execution starts. The video below gives a demo of the deployment.