Codenvy Cloud IDE Now Directly Supports Tier 3 Web Fabric PaaS

By Richard Seroter, Senior Product Manager. Find Richard on Twitter

Just a couple weeks ago, we looked at how Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) helps developers rapidly build and deploy applications to the cloud. We also covered a new breed of cloud-based development environments (IDE) that developers can use to create and publish their web applications. Since then, the cloud-based IDE we featured – called Codenvy – has updated their product to support the Tier 3 Web Fabric. In this post, we’ll walk through how to quickly and easily deploy and manage Web Fabric applications from your web browser.

To start with, when users of Codenvy start a new web application project, they are asked which technology they want to use, and then which PaaS to deploy to. At this moment, the Tier 3 Web Fabric is available for Java Web Application (WAR), Java Spring, and Ruby on Rails projects. Note that Web Fabric works with more environments than these three, but these are the technologies supported via Codenvy.

Once the user chooses the technology and corresponding PaaS, they choose a simple project template (if one exists for that technology), and are then asked for the management API endpoint of the Web Fabric environment.

The project framework is then created, and the user is prompted for their Web Fabric credentials. After providing a valid username and password, the application is deployed and Internet-accessible. All of this in matter of seconds! To update the application, developers visit the PaaS menu option and choose Tier 3 Web Fabric.

From the subsequent window, developers can modify the name, URL, and memory allocation of the application. Additionally, the application can be started, stopped, deleted, and updated. It’s also possible to add Web Fabric application services – such as RabbitMQ for messaging or Microsoft SQL Server for relational database storage – to a project.

Codenvy can also be used as a simple management interface for any applications running in Web Fabric. This can come in handy if you’re on a shared machine without the typical Cloud Foundry management tools available!

This interface shows you each application running in your Web Fabric environment, and lets you start, stop, restart, or delete it.

Summary

We’re excited to be a supported part of the innovative Codenvy platform and think that this lowers the barrier to entry for our customers while making it simpler for developers to build amazing applications in any language of their choice. Want to try it out? Sign up for a free Codenvy account and then take Web Fabric for a spin!

The Simplest Way to Build and Deploy Web Applications to the Cloud? Use PaaS and Cloud IDEs!

By Richard Seroter, Senior Product Manager. Find Richard on Twitter

Web applications are a dominant part of most enterprise IT portfolios and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) products offer a compelling way to easily deploy and manage these applications. However, PaaS have proven tricky for vendors to explain, and therefore difficult for customers to understand. In this post, we’ll discuss the reason you should consider using PaaS products, what Tier 3 has to offer, and how you can deploy a web application to a PaaS in a matter of minutes.

Benefits of PaaS

What exactly is PaaS? Basically, it’s a way of delivering an application platform as a service. Developers don’t interface directly with infrastructure (e.g. servers, networks, load balancers) but rather, focus on building and deployment applications through a set of exposed services in a managed fabric. PaaS simplifies the deployment and management of modern web applications while making those applications more resilient and functional. How can PaaS add value to your organization? Let’s drill into some specifics:

 
• Reduce server sprawl with a centralized host for web applications. How many web servers are sitting relatively idle in your data center because they are only running a handful of applications? Server sprawl can be a major issue as each IT project requisitions its own hardware for application development/staging/QA/production. What about all your websites for customers and marketing campaigns? It’s possible that you’re using many different servers (and even providers!) to host all of those individual websites. PaaS can offer a centralized fabric that can be sized and optimized for hundreds of internal or external web applications.
 
• Save money by adding resources only when you need them. Many PaaS products have a concept of automatic scale or user-driven resizing to account for spikes or dips in utilization. Before cloud computing, organizations typically sized their infrastructure for peaks and accepted that their environment would be underutilized the majority of the time. Now, it’s possible to deploy a web application with a 128MB memory allocation, and instantly double it when needed. Need to spread the workload across multiple machines? Simply issue a command to add the application to another node in the PaaS fabric. No calls to the operations team, no formal “deployment” exercises. PaaS makes it possible to size and scale applications on demand, which makes it easier for you to manage the overall environment.
 
• Focus on your application, and don’t sweat the infrastructure. One of the most important benefits of PaaS is that it abstracts the infrastructure away from the application, and the developer. Developers deploy to a fabric, not a server. There’s no need for the IT project team to provision web or database servers. Simply push applications to the existing PaaS environment. The infrastructure itself is managed closely by an operations team and automation is included at all levels to deliver automatic patching, scaling, monitoring and more.
 
• Multi-tenancy and high-availability baked in. PaaS products are designed to deliver high-availability to multiple applications (or “tenants”) and are therefore scaled out to provide significant compute capacity. As such, you’ll find many PaaS products with built-in load balancing services, failover when servers fail, concurrency management,  and more. All of these features boost reliability and performance for each application hosted in the PaaS. Even applications not specifically designed for PaaS can conceivably be deployed to a PaaS with little to no code refactoring.
 
• Avoid unnecessary duplication by using consolidated application services. When most people think of PaaS they think of hosting web applications, but some of the best capabilities are those offered by complimentary services.  Most PaaS products offer add-on services like databases, storage, identity management, messaging, caching and more. You’ll also find some PaaS products that offer business services such as service catalogs, and API management and monitoring. Developers can use these services when building their web applications and not have to provision or locate hardware to host those services at runtime. These services simply exist inside the PaaS and are available to all applications deployed there.
 
• Deliver “IT as a Service” through measured usage for easy chargebacks. A core tenet of cloud computing is “pay as you go” and measured usage. A true PaaS is built upon a “cloudy” foundation that tracks utilization and delivers an all-up cost to the user at the end of the month (or whenever the user checks their charges). Because of this cost transparency, it’s easy for organizations to deliver “IT as a service” by offering a PaaS for internal/external websites and passing along the usage-based invoices to each department.

All of this helps developers produce faster deployments while giving system administrators a more streamlined operations responsibility.

Why Tier 3 Web Fabric?

Tier 3 has its own PaaS product – called Web Fabric – that is based on Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry project. We’ve added the open-source Iron Foundry extensions so that we can offer some of the best language and framework support in the industry. Unlike the shared PaaS services offered by others, Web Fabric is provisioned uniquely for each customer. This gives you the isolation you need, while still offering a robust platform for all the custom applications used by your organization. The default Web Fabric environment consists of five total servers and can support dozens of web applications.

Why might you choose to use the Tier 3 Web Fabric to host your modern web applications? We like to point out at least five reasons:

 
1. Support for the programming languages you already use. Most IT shops are heterogeneous and use technologies from multiple vendors. You may have written a number of enterprise-class web applications in .NET or Java, but also have departments that make use of Ruby or PHP. If you’re doing more mobile development, you might have started looking at Node.js for high performing web applications. Tier 3’s Web Fabric supports all those programming languages and more. Instead of using multiple PaaS products or infrastructure clouds to host your diverse application portfolio, use a single fabric for all of them!
 
2. Application services to cover your scenarios. Need a relational database? We offer MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Microsoft SQL Server. Looking for a NoSQL repository? Web Fabric has Redis and MongoDB. RabbitMQ is also available when you want to add a durable message queue to your solution. In addition, each Web Fabric comes with New Relic monitoring for web applications. This excellent application performance management tool gives you deep insight that helps identify bottlenecks and monitor application health.
 
3. Cloud Foundry ecosystem. There’s no doubting the impact of Cloud Foundry on the PaaS industry. This open source project was launched in 2010 and has been adopted by multiple PaaS vendors. Not only does this make it straightforward to move applications between Cloud Foundry-compliant clouds, but also means that there are multiple parties creating tools that work for any Cloud Foundry environment. From the Windows-based Cloud Foundry Explorer, to the OSX-friendly Project Thor, to web-based development environments, there’s a growing ecosystem of vendors and tools to help you be successful with Cloud Foundry.
 
4. Enterprise-class infrastructure. Tier 3’s network of highly resilient, globally distributed infrastructure is optimized for performance throughout the stack. And since Web Fabric runs on the Tier 3 enterprise cloud, your applications will be powered by high performing storage, multiple VPN options, security services, and much more.
 
5. IaaS and PaaS, better together. Not all workloads fit into a PaaS platform, and not all applications require dedicated infrastructure. By offering our customers enterprise-class infrastructure in addition to Web Fabric, we’ve provided two useful hosting mechanisms in the same cloud. Keep your PaaS applications geographically close to your IaaS applications and data, and share the same management tools, security profile, and networking configuration.

Deploying to Web Fabric from a Cloud-based Development Environment

Developers can push their application to Web Fabric in a number of ways. While most developers are familiar with command line interfaces and GUI tools that run on their desktop, a new crop of cloud-based integrated development environments (IDEs) can make PaaS deployments even simpler. Cloud IDEs offer excellent collaboration capabilities, easy accessibility, and “no-touch” setup.

One such cloud IDE is Codenvy. This tool works natively with Cloud Foundry, making it easy to build Java/Ruby/Python/PHP applications and then push them to Web Fabric. After signing up for a free account, the developer is presented with the option to link to GitHub or any Git repository.

Codenvy uses a handy “new project” wizard experience to help the developer choose which programming language to use, and then which (supported) PaaS to push to. In the short animation below, observe how I created a new Java Spring project, chose Cloud Foundry (Web Fabric) as a destination, finish the wizard and publish the application to Web Fabric.

The Codenvy IDE includes many developer productivity features including type-ahead coding (i.e. “intellisense”), code generation, formatting tools, and much more. Changing the application code and re-publishing the application to Web Fabric is simple. Notice how easy it is to resize my application (e.g. memory, instance count) at any time!

Besides simply deploying applications, Codenvy supports simple management of existing applications. From the PaaS –> Cloud Foundry –> Applications menu, I can see all the applications that I’ve deployed to Web Fabric and stop/start/restart/delete any of them.

Developers using cloud-based IDEs don’t get all the features of desktop IDEs (like access to local resources, plug-ins), but they are an increasingly viable choice for developers who are trying new technologies or need access to their IDE from any computer.

Summary

With our enterprise-class infrastructure and platform cloud, Tier 3 is uniquely positioned to address your cloud needs. Web Fabric is an ideal host for your modern web applications and its Cloud Foundry heritage makes it compatible with a wide array of tools including cloud-based IDEs like Codenvy.

Interested in taking a look at Web Fabric? Contact us for a demonstration and free trial!

Tier 3 Expands Enterprise Cloud Platform with Multi-Framework Web Fabric and Data Fabric

New Platform and Database Services Join Tier 3 Enterprise Infrastructure Service, Setting New Bar for Comprehensive Cloud Platforms

BELLEVUE, Wash. — May 8, 2012 ― Tier 3, Inc., the enterprise cloud platform company, today announced the next release of the Tier 3 Enterprise Cloud Platform, now with the industry’s most comprehensive set of enterprise-grade cloud services in a single consolidated platform. The Tier 3 cloud now features Web Fabric, a multi-framework enterprise platform as a service (PaaS) and Data Fabric, a high availability database as a service (DbaaS).  These services join the company’s existing enterprise-grade infrastructure services for a powerful, first-of-a-kind combination that enables businesses to accelerate “greenfield” application development and deliver critical legacy business systems in one cloud platform.

Businesses around the world today rely on Tier 3’s Enterprise Cloud – a VMware vCloud® Powered Service -  to run their back office and line of business applications in a secure virtual private cloud, counting on the platform’s availability, security, performance and built-in disaster recovery capabilities. Now with Tier 3’s multi-language (“polyglot”) Web Fabric, businesses gain the application development and deployment agility of cloud-based on-demand runtime environments, enabling developers to focus on business innovation without sacrificing stringent enterprise security requirements.  Tier 3 Web Fabric also gives customers the ability to:

• Leverage Cloud Foundry and Iron Foundry to support the broadest set of languages and frameworks (including .NET, Java, Node.js, Ruby, PHP, and Python) while ensuring interoperability across clouds. 
• Directly deploy and scale any web application while automatically tapping into enterprise-grade capabilities such as high availability, disaster recovery as well as advanced application monitoring from New Relic.
• Deploy Web Fabric in a secure environment ensuring no risk of “shared” access from other customers and enabling it to run side-by-side with Tier 3’s infrastructure services (IaaS) in private VLANs to better support direct integration with business applications and systems.

“The needs of the enterprises are diverse as they expect not only superior performance and reliability but also enterprise-grade security. While commodity clouds are well suited for greenfield applications, they are not ready to meet the enterprise demands with mixed environments,” said Krishnan Subramanian, principal analyst, Rishidot Research. “With a multi-pronged approach to infrastructure, platform and data, Tier 3 can enable enterprises to take advantage of the cloud without any disruption to their existing processes. In this context, this announcement is a significant as it represents a step forward in cloud services designed specifically to meet the needs of modern enterprises.”

To further enhance IT agility, Tier 3 is also introducing the first in a series of fabric services, the Tier 3 Data Fabric. Delivering enterprise-grade database services (DbaaS), Data Fabric can be called by Tier 3 virtual machines or Web Fabric or even external applications, and works with a broad set of databases including Redis, MongoDB, Microsoft SQL Server, My SQL, and VMware vFabric™ Postgres.   Data Fabric features a high availability mode, auto-scaling, and high performance with automated built-in backups to help reduce the burden of operational task management.  Tier 3 will release other fabric services such as messaging, queuing, and caching throughout 2012.

“We are seeing a fundamental shift in the industry to multi-service clouds systems.   Enterprise IT departments are rapidly adopting enterprise-class hybrid cloud platforms for business-critical legacy applications, but true PaaS adoption has been stalled due to stringent requirements for security without sacrificing HA, performance and scale and management complexity,” said Jared Wray, Tier 3 founder chief technology officer. “The Tier 3 Enterprise Cloud Platform with Web Fabric and Data Fabric is game changing for mid-size to large enterprises.  They can now leverage the flexibility of a complete set of enterprise-grade public cloud services together in the same service and from behind the corporate firewall—standard virtual machine capabilities for enhanced agility and a services fabric to streamline the rapid development of new features.”  

“The Tier 3 Enterprise Cloud Platform’s new capabilities of Web Fabric, based on VMware vCloud®, Cloud Foundry™, and Data Fabric can provide robust and flexible cloud services to a wide range of enterprises,” said Jerry Chen, vice president, Cloud and Application Services, VMware. “By using Tier 3’s Enterprise Cloud Platform, underpinned by VMware’s cloud infrastructure, organizations can realize the benefits and value of multi-cloud services.”

Availability

Tier 3 Web Fabric is generally available May 8 and Data Fabric is in beta until June 1.  Tier 3 is demonstrating its Enterprise Cloud Platform including Web Fabric and Data Fabric May 8-10 at Interop Vegas booth 615.

Resources

• Whitepaper: Beyond IaaS and PaaS to Enterprise Cloud Services
• Tier 3 Enterprise Cloud Platform Technical Datasheet

Supporting Quotes

• “Users of cloud systems-infrastructure services (IaaS) are increasingly looking for more “cloudiness” in their services and turn to cloud application-infrastructure services (PaaS) for automated application elasticity, multi-tenancy and higher-function self-service,” commented Yefim Natis, VP Distinguished Analyst at Gartner, Inc. “To meet this requirement many IaaS providers add middleware capability to their offering (IaaS+) and some develop a native PaaS offering.  Both approaches will find some demand in the market in the short term, though the native PaaS will emerge as the definitive cloud platform service in the long term.”
• “Infrastructure services ease the transition from legacy client-server computing, while cloud platform services like Tier 3’s Web and Data Fabrics are the natural evolution of cloud computing, freeing developers to concentrate on the applications rather than the supporting infrastructure,” said Chris Sharp, general manager, cloud and content for Equinix. “Platform Equinix offers customers a rich environment to build and integrate private, public, and hybrid cloud solutions. Customers now have access to Tier 3’s infrastructure and platform services via dedicated private connections from Equinix data centers and over the Internet via multiple carriers.”
• “The Tier 3 Web Fabric with Iron Foundry offers a unique value to organizations by providing unparalleled choice in development frameworks,” said Richard Seroter, InfoQ editor and Microsoft MVP. “Enterprises can now leverage one of the best possible platform-as-a-service frameworks while taking advantage of Tier 3’s top notch infrastructure offering.” 
• “As enterprises rapidly embrace cloud services, they want to ensure their cloud-based apps are delivering the highest standard of performance and availability,” says Bill Lapcevic, Vice President of Business Development, New Relic. “ With our application monitoring as a standard feature in Web Fabric, together Tier 3 and New Relic are providing our customers with the best tools for identifying and resolving potential performance issues in their business-critical applications.”      

About Tier 3

Tier 3 delivers enterprise-class cloud services to businesses globally via its federated Enterprise Cloud Platform.  The Bellevue, WA-based company provides a comprehensive set of enterprise-grade virtual private cloud services enhanced by a framework-agnostic cloud orchestration and automation to enable IT agility. Architected for security, performance and high availability ― with 99.999% SLA at all layers and disaster recovery in every deployment — the Tier 3 Cloud is ideal for the entire business application portfolio from development to production environments and mission-critical applications.

VMware, VMware vFabric and Cloud Foundry are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. The use of the word “partner” or “partnership” does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.

Say Hello to Iron Foundry—An Open-Source, .NET PaaS Framework

At Tier 3, we’ve been big supporters of Cloud Foundry—the VMware-led, open-source PaaS framework—from the beginning. That said, we’re a .NET shop and many of our customers’ most critical applications are .NET-based. So today we’ve decided to contribute Iron Foundry, our own .NET fork of Cloud Foundry, back to the community as an open-source project.

This project includes both the primary framework as well as both a Windows version of Cloud Foundry Explorer and a Visual Studio Plugin for Cloud Foundry. (Video demos for the command line interface and Visual Studio plugin are located at the bottom of this post.) Because developers can run their own instances of Iron Foundry in-house or with any service provider who supports it, developers finally have a truly open, interoperable .NET PaaS solution that can be run inside and outside the firewall. And because you can run your own instances of Iron Foundry, it’s easy to have a full test, QA, and staging environment before pushing to production.

In addition, operations teams now have the freedom to choose among various service providers that meet their needs in areas such as security, compliance, availability, location, etc. For developers who are interested in trying Iron Foundry, we have put together a “try it now” test bed package on IronFoundry.org that offers the compute resources needed to run one web and one database instance per developer free for 90 days on Tier 3’s Enterprise Cloud Platform. Iron Foundry is Cloud Foundry + .Net. This means developers have access to standard tools—enabling them to write .Net code against a MySQL backend, for example, or just write against a simple name-value pair datastore like Redis. Another advantage that Iron Foundry inherits is the ability to add instances to an application on the fly with the app being pushed automatically each new node. The core source code will be available on GitHub under an Apache 2.0 license. You can also download and install Iron Foundry with Cloud Foundry from our web site at www.ironfoundry.org. Read the full press release here.

Iron Foundry Video Demo