AppScale

Last updated
AppScale Systems, Inc.
Industry Cloud Computing
Founder
  • Woody Rollins
  • Chandra Krintz
  • Navraj Chohan
Headquarters
Santa Barbara, California
Key people
Website https://appscale.com (defunct)

AppScale is a software company that offers cloud infrastructure software and services to enterprises, government agencies, contractors, and third-party service providers. The company commercially supports one software product, AppScale ATS, a managed hybrid cloud infrastructure software platform that emulates the core AWS APIs. In 2019, the company ended commercial support for its open-source serverless computing platform AppScale GTS, but AppScale GTS source code remains freely available to the open-source community. [1]

Contents

History

AppScale began as a research project at the University of California, Santa Barbara Computer Science Department under the supervision of Professor Chandra Krintz. [2] The project was originally funded by the NSF, with additional funding from Google, IBM and NIH. In 2012, co-founders Dr. Chandra Krintz, Chief Scientist, Dr. Navraj Chohan, Development Lead, and Woody Rollins, CEO founded AppScale Systems to commercialize the private PaaS AppScale technology. Rollins, a pioneer in private cloud infrastructure, was a co-founder and former CEO of Eucalyptus Systems. [3] In 2014, Graziano Obertelli joined AppScale as VP of Operations from Eucalyptus Systems, where he was a co-founder. [4] In 2017, Dimitrii Calzago joined AppScale as CTO from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, where he was Director of Cloud R&D. [5]

In April 2014, AppScale Systems was named a 2014 Cool Vendor in PaaS by Gartner, Inc. [6] In September 2014, AppScale Systems won a Bossie Award from InfoWorld for best open source data center and cloud software. [7] AppScale partnered with Optimal Dynamics on April 11, 2016. [8] AppScale was part of the AliLaunch Program, August 9, 2016. [9] Chandra Krintz, Chief Science Officer of AppScale, was featured on Dev Radio in the episode titled "How to Rescue your apps with the help of AppScale" on December 16, 2016. [10]

In late 2017, AppScale Systems started offering commercial support for Eucalyptus private cloud software after DXC Technology chose to stop the development and support of Eucalyptus. This prompted AppScale, led by members of the Eucalyptus founding team, to fork the code and continue developing the software, which was renamed AppScale ATS.

AppScale ATS

AppScale ATS (formerly Eucalyptus) is a managed hybrid cloud infrastructure software that emulates the core AWS APIs. AppScale ATS implements AWS-compatible cloud services over dedicated infrastructure, providing a dedicated private AWS region. ATS enables the creation of cost-effective and flexible AWS hybrid cloud environments with a seamless experience for developers and workloads across public and private resources. No special-purpose hardware or unorthodox operating system configurations are required and the entire software stack utilizes open-sourced components. The software is primarily used by enterprises and government agencies to place data and compute in specific geographies (for compliance) or close to data sources (for latency).

AppScale GTS

AppScale GTS is an open-source serverless computing platform that automatically deploys and scales unmodified Google App Engine applications over public and private clouds and on-premises clusters. [11] AppScale is modeled on the App Engine APIs and supports Go, Java, PHP, and Python applications. [12]

The platform has a rapid API-driven development environment that can run applications on any cloud infrastructure. [13] It decouples app logic from its service ecosystem, allowing better control over app deployment, data storage, resource use, backup, migration, service discovery, load-balancing, fault-tolerance, and auto-scaling. [14]

AppScale was developed and maintained by AppScale Systems, Inc., based in Santa Barbara, California, and Google. [15]

Open source components

Supported platforms

Supported languages

See also

Related Research Articles

Memcached is a general-purpose distributed memory-caching system. It is often used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in RAM to reduce the number of times an external data source must be read. Memcached is free and open-source software, licensed under the Revised BSD license. Memcached runs on Unix-like operating systems and on Microsoft Windows. It depends on the libevent library.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Univa</span> Software company

Univa was a software company that developed workload management and cloud management products for compute-intensive applications in the data center and across public, private, and hybrid clouds, before being acquired by Altair Engineering in September 2020.

Google App Engine is a cloud computing platform used as a service for developing and hosting of web applications. Applications are sandboxed and run across multiple Google-managed servers. GAE supports automatic scaling for web applications, allocating more resources to the web application as the amount of requests increases. It was released as a preview in April 2008, and launched officially in September 2011.

zembly

Zembly was a browser-based development environment from Sun Microsystems that enabled social programming of applications for Facebook, Meebo, OpenSocial, iPhone web applications, and other social platforms, as well as web widgets. Users of zembly interacted with one another via zembly's social networking features to engage in co-development of applications for these platforms. It was available from 2008 to 2009.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cloud computing</span> Form of shared internet-based computing

Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over multiple locations, each of which is a data center. Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and typically uses a pay-as-you-go model, which can help in reducing capital expenses but may also lead to unexpected operating expenses for users.

Eucalyptus is a paid and open-source computer software for building Amazon Web Services (AWS)-compatible private and hybrid cloud computing environments, originally developed by the company Eucalyptus Systems. Eucalyptus is an acronym for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems. Eucalyptus enables pooling compute, storage, and network resources that can be dynamically scaled up or down as application workloads change. Mårten Mickos was the CEO of Eucalyptus. In September 2014, Eucalyptus was acquired by Hewlett-Packard and then maintained by DXC Technology. After DXC stopped developing the product in late 2017, AppScale Systems forked the code and started supporting Eucalyptus customers.

A cloud database is a database that typically runs on a cloud computing platform and access to the database is provided as-a-service. There are two common deployment models: users can run databases on the cloud independently, using a virtual machine image, or they can purchase access to a database service, maintained by a cloud database provider. Of the databases available on the cloud, some are SQL-based and some use a NoSQL data model.

Backend as a service (BaaS), sometimes also referred to as mobile backend as a service (MBaaS), is a service for providing web app and mobile app developers with a way to easily build a backend to their frontend applications. Features available include user management, push notifications, and integration with social networking services. These services are provided via the use of custom software development kits (SDKs) and application programming interfaces (APIs). BaaS is a relatively recent development in cloud computing, with most BaaS startups dating from 2011 or later. Some of the most popular service providers are AWS Amplify and Firebase.

In computing, Hazelcast is a unified real-time data platform based on Java that combines a fast data store with stream processing. It is also the name of the company developing the product. The Hazelcast company is funded by venture capital and headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP), offered by Google, is a suite of cloud computing services that provides a series of modular cloud services including computing, data storage, data analytics, and machine learning, alongside a set of management tools. It runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search, Gmail, and Google Docs, according to Verma, et.al. Registration requires a credit card or bank account details.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">HPE Helion</span>

HPE Helion was Hewlett-Packard's portfolio of open-source software and integrated systems for enterprise cloud computing. It was announced by HPE Cloud in May 2014. HPE Helion grew from under US$300 million to over US$3 billion by 2016. HP closed the public cloud business on 31 January 2016. HP has hybrid cloud and other offerings but the Helion public cloud offering was shut down.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AWS Lambda</span> Serverless computing platform

AWS Lambda is an event-driven, serverless Function as a Service (FaaS) provided by Amazon as a part of Amazon Web Services. It is designed to enable developers to run code without provisioning or managing servers. It executes code in response to events and automatically manages the computing resources required by that code. It was introduced on November 13, 2014.

The Serverless Framework is a free and open-source web framework written using Node.js. Serverless is the first framework developed for building applications on AWS Lambda, a serverless computing platform provided by Amazon as a part of Amazon Web Services. Currently, applications developed with Serverless can be deployed to other function as a service providers, including Microsoft Azure with Azure Functions, IBM Bluemix with IBM Cloud Functions based on Apache OpenWhisk, Google Cloud using Google Cloud Functions, Oracle Cloud using Oracle Fn, Kubeless based on Kubernetes, Spotinst and Webtask by Auth0.

Serverless computing is a cloud computing execution model in which the cloud provider allocates machine resources on demand, taking care of the servers on behalf of their customers. "Serverless" is a misnomer in the sense that servers are still used by cloud service providers to execute code for developers. However, developers of serverless applications are not concerned with capacity planning, configuration, management, maintenance, fault tolerance, or scaling of containers, virtual machines, or physical servers. When an app is not in use, there are no computing resources allocated to the app. Pricing is based on the actual amount of resources consumed by an application. It can be a form of utility computing.

Amazon ElastiCache is a fully managed in-memory data store and cache service by Amazon Web Services (AWS). The service improves the performance of web applications by retrieving information from managed in-memory caches, instead of relying entirely on slower disk-based databases. ElastiCache supports two open-source in-memory caching engines: Memcached and Redis.

Function as a service (FaaS) is a category of cloud computing services that provides a platform allowing customers to develop, run, and manage application functionalities without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure typically associated with developing and launching an app. Building an application following this model is one way of achieving a "serverless" architecture, and is typically used when building microservices applications.

Apache MXNet is an open-source deep learning software framework that trains and deploys deep neural networks. It aims to be scalable, allows fast model training, and supports a flexible programming model and multiple programming languages. The MXNet library is portable and can scale to multiple GPUs and machines. It was co-developed by Carlos Guestrin at the University of Washington, along with GraphLab.

AWS Glue is an event-driven, serverless computing platform provided by Amazon as a part of Amazon Web Services. It was introduced in August 2017.

Yandex Cloud is a public cloud platform developed by the Russian internet company Yandex. Yandex Cloud provides private and corporate users with infrastructure and computing resources in an ‘as a service’ format.

References

  1. ↑ "AppScale GTS". GitHub . 9 March 2022.
  2. ↑ Urquhart, James. (2009-06-22) The new generation of cloud-development platforms | The Wisdom of Clouds - CNET News. News.cnet.com. Retrieved on 2013-09-18.
  3. ↑ Google App Engine Blog: Research Project: AppScale at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Googleappengine.blogspot.com (2010-10-22). Retrieved on 2013-09-18.
  4. ↑ . LinkedIn.com. Graziano Obertelli Profile. Retrieved on 2018-03-09.
  5. ↑ . LinkedIn.com. Dmitrii Calzago Profile. Retrieved on 2018-03-09.
  6. ↑ . Gartner, Inc. (2014-04-28). Retrieved on 2014-08-06.
  7. ↑ . InfoWorld (2014-09-29). Retrieved on 2014-10-14.
  8. ↑ . CNBC.com (2016-04-11). Retrieved on 2018-03-09.
  9. ↑ . AlibabaGroup.com (2016-08-09). Retrieved on 2018-03-09.
  10. ↑ . Channel9.msdn.com (2016-12-16). Retrieved on 2018-03-09.
  11. ↑ AppScale Launches As An Open-Source Backup Equivalent To Google App Engine. TechCrunch (2013-06-24). Retrieved on 2013-09-18.
  12. ↑ Google App Engine Blog: Research Project: AppScale at University of California, Santa Barbara. Googleappengine.blogspot.com (2010-10-22). Retrieved on 2013-09-18.
  13. ↑ Darrow, Barb. (2013-06-04) AppScale’s mission: Making your mobile apps really mobile — Tech News and Analysis. Gigaom.com. Retrieved on 2013-09-18.
  14. ↑ . Yahoo! Finance (2014-06-10). Retrieved on 2014-07-10.
  15. ↑ Lee, Justin. (2013-06-28) . The WHIR. Retrieved on 2014-07-10.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.