Enterprise "app stores" in the cloud
In conjunction with the well attended Interop and Enterprise Cloud Summit conferences in Las Vegas this week, cloud infrastructure and service vendor 3TERA announced the 3TERA AppStore, an online portal containing a variety of "cloud ready" components for use on their AppLogic platform. This is the latest commercialization of cloud image stores, and another example of how cloud computing enables marketplaces that were difficult or impossible to do before.
(Credit:
3TERA)
One of the earliest example of this trend comes from none other than Amazon, which provided a commercial payment system (called DevPay) for their Amazon Machine Image store some time ago. What has come of that experiment is in fact an amazing adoption rate for even some of the biggest software system companies in the business, including Oracle and IBM.
Others are working to catch up in this space as well. I know that at least one of the major IaaS providers and one of the cloud management vendors are working to make a play in this space. Getting people to buy pre-configured, pre-architected enterprise software to run in various cloud platforms is going to be an integral part of the cloud experience, and probably a very profitable one.
The 3TERA offering focuses, of course, on their platform, but AppLogic is one of a few platforms that take a true "virtual data center" approach to the problem. Sun's new cloud is another. My gut tells me that these guys have a bit of an advantage when it comes to "packaging" enterprise apps for the clouds, as they can easily include network and storage with the server architecture in one SKU.
Initial AppStore partners include CohesiveFT, Layer 7 Technologies, SOASTA, Tap In Systems, and Zeus Technology.
James Urquhart is a seasoned field technologist with almost 20 years of experience in distributed systems development and deployment, focusing on service-oriented architectures, cloud computing, and virtualization. James is currently market manager for the Data Center 3.0 strategy at Cisco Systems, though the opinions expressed here are strictly his own. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. 
You are right, of course -- in our daily work, we use a lot of standard, off-the-shelf things, as well as some amount of custom builds. Appliances in the AppStore can be fully ready-to-run self-contained appliances, like SSL accelerators, routers, load balancers, etc.; or they can be servers on which you can add your own code/data (apache, .NET, Websphere, MySQL, Oracle, etc.). In addition, in the AppLogic world -- the target for AppStore appliances -- it is easy to mix and match standard components and custom components.
Many users take whatever the appliance catalog offers and use it as-is, add their own custom appliances -- whether built from ISO, from base image or by customizing an existing open appliance.
I hope that helps,
Peter @ 3Tera
- by cprimault June 16, 2009 8:12 AM PDT
- I also trust that packaging "Cloud Ready" virtual applications will be a smart way for ISVs to find users (and for users to find apps!) but I am concerned with the proprietary angle that these paltforms take. Donīt users need a way to forget about the underlying tech stacks and just decide to pick an app because it serves a business? Overtime users will have a greater power that vendors and will force the market to be fully interoperable. Will this leave some space for infrastructure and tools vendors to have their very own app store? I would love to hear your views.
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(5 Comments)Christophe