GigaSpaces Technologies, a pioneer of next generation application and cloud enablement platforms for business-critical applications, now makes it possible for enterprises to take hundreds of applications to the cloud of their choice, with its new release of the open source Cloudify product. Many enterprises building their own cloud, or looking to take advantage of cloud offerings, have been struggling with cloud adoption due to the complexity of moving their existing and legacy applications to the cloud. Through its new partnership with OpsCode, and a dedicated Chef integration that caters to diverse application stacks and systems, this migration has now been significantly simplified.

“The concept of DevOps and recipes can go well beyond setup, to actually manage the entire lifecycle of your applications—from setup, to monitoring, through maintaining high availability, and auto-scaling when required. This is where Cloudify and Chef come together,” says Bryan Hale, Director of Business Development for OpsCode. “By enabling users to leverage the power and variety of Chef recipes and cookbooks to deploy services, Cloudify supports comprehensive application level orchestration on any cloud.”

In addition to the integration with Chef, this new release also includes the following features:

• Complete application-level orchestration, allowing automated provisioning, deployment, management and scaling of complex multi-tier apps to any cloud environment
• Built-in, ready to use recipes for common big data components, such as Hadoop, Cassandra and MongoDB.
• Support for non-virtualized environments (AKA Bring Your Own Node), allowing you to treat an arbitrary set of server as your “Cloud” and have Cloudify deploy and manage applications on these servers.
• Comprehensive REST API for easy integration with third-party tooling and programmatic access.
• Support for all the common cloud infrastructures, including OpenStack, HPCloud, RackSpace, Windows Azure, Apache CloudStack, Amazon AWS and vCloud.

In addition, Cloudify now also simplifies the complexities involved with deploying big data applications to the cloud. It is well-known that the massive computing and storage resources that are needed to support big data deployments make cloud environments, public and private, an ideal fit. But managing big data application on the cloud is no easy feat - as these systems and applications often include other services such as relational and non-relational databases, stream processing tools, web front ends and more, where each framework comes with its own management, installation, configuration, and scaling mechanisms. With its new built-in recipes, Cloudify provides consistent management and cloud portability for popular big data tools, exponentially reducing the operational and infrastructure costs involved with running these systems.

“We’re seeing a growing market trend for the need to migrate applications – not just in one-off processes anymore – but on a much larger scale, by enterprises, managed service providers, and ISVs alike, who are looking to take advantage of the cloud promise—while until now, only about 5% have actually been able to do so,” says Uri Cohen, Vice President of Product Management at GigaSpaces. “The beauty of Cloudify and its recipe-based model is that it enables you to simply and smoothly take both new and existing applications to the cloud by the tens and hundreds through Cloudify’s built-in recipes and the new integration with OpsCode’s Chef, in very short time frames.”

Availability and Download Information

You can fork the Cloudify code from GitHub, or download the Cloudify GA release.

What’s Next?

Stay tuned for Cloudify 2.3 which will be released in the upcoming weeks, just in time for the holidays.

For those looking for early access to this soon to be released version, feel free to download the latest 2.3 milestone builds and start playing around with its new features, including:

• Improved cloud template administration
• Multi-tenant & multi-role security
• Configurable deployments, including recipe and cloud driver parameterization
• Support for OpenStack Essex and Folsom – and more.

Visit the CloudifySource Community | Check out the Chef Integration | Read our Documentation |

CloudifySource Forums | Cloudify Blog | CloudifySourceTV

About GigaSpaces

GigaSpaces Technologies is the pioneer of a new generation of application virtualization platforms and a leading provider of end-to-end scaling solutions for distributed, mission-critical application environments, and cloud enabling technologies. GigaSpaces is the only platform on the market that offers truly silo-free architecture, along with operational agility and openness, delivering enhanced efficiency, extreme performance and always-on availability. The GigaSpaces solutions are designed from the ground up to run on any cloud environment – private, public, or hybrid – and offer a pain-free, evolutionary path to meet tomorrow’s IT challenges.

Hundreds of organizations worldwide use GigaSpaces’ technology to enhance IT efficiency and performance, among which are Fortune Global 500 companies, including top financial service enterprises, e-commerce companies, online gaming providers, and telecom carriers.

For more information, visit gigaspaces.com, or our blog at blog.gigaspaces.com.