Appcara is an unfortunately named (considering the fact that Cloud Foundry creator, and Clouderati pin up boy Derek Collison’s new gig is called Apcera) company in the business of providing automation for cloud deployments. They use a modeling based approach towards designing and deploying cloud infrastructure. Appcara today announced an integration with Eucalyptus’ on-premise cloud stack and, by default, this then gives them an integration with Amazon Web Services and hence portability between public and private clouds (so long as those clouds are AWS for public and Euca for private).
With Appcara’s AppStack, users can deploy cloud applications that should be more readily managed across their lifecycle than with bog-standard cloud control panels. AppStack captures and assembles the entire application environment regardless of languages and development platforms and provides automation throughout the application lifecycle. In addition, and perhaps more interestingly, AppStack includes some application marketplace capability, allowing users to offer self-service publishing capabilities to enable software-as-a-service. Enterprise users can subscribe to software applications using point-and-click user interface.
MyPOV
Another contender for the cloud management crown, alongside BMC, enStratus, RightScale and many others, Appcara adds interest today through their marketplace functionality. I’ve long argued that heterogeneity will be the order for the day for enterprises for the foreseeable future – if you accept that fact, and also accept that enterprises are going to want to enable their users to access a broad portfolio of application, then it makes sense to see a cloud management platform that includes broad marketplace functionality.
My vision sees an enterprise use a vendor as a singe pane of glass across all of their afferent infrastructure, and also offers all of their users a customized marketplace to select different applications according to their needs. With Appcara, users have the ability to offer that application marketplace, and deploy those apps across public and/or private clouds.
