With the wide acceptance of Agile development methodologies and the advent of frameworks like Rails we are seeing a very fast increase in the speed that new solutions and ideas can be delivered.
Combined with that we are seeing a very fast uptake in the use and acceptance of cloud computing solutions. Both of those developments lower the barrier of entry for new and innovative applications, as they allow a considerable reduction in the development and delivery costs.
One part still requires time, effort, and a lot of knowledge - the deployment of applications into production quality systems. The cost of maintaining and managing production systems are very high, and require a skill set very different from the one needed to develop applications. It also requires a constant expenditure on people skilled in system administration, and in training them to keep up with the constant developments in systems, hosting, and related software.
Faced with this problem many times in the past when developing and deploying client application at Exist Global, we realized a better solution needed to be found. And the Morph AppSpace and AppCloud are the result of the effort we put into solving the deployment problem. Both solutions are based on the same premise of providing a simple, reliable and fast deployment, while keeping an ultra-reliable, redundant and managed infrastructure. Both solutions completely hide the system administration tasks from the developers, letting them concentrate on the application logic and domain specific IP.
AppSpace is geared for most web based apps using Rails, Java or PHP, and allow scaling to a large number of users and requests. It comes with a DB running in warm-backup mode, and include additional offline backup, to guarantee data availability. It also includes a fully redundant infrastructure from the routing system, through the front-balancers and the application servers. The system is constantly monitored and checked to make sure everything is running as expected. Support and infrastructure technicians make sure that every error is handled immediately to minimize the chance of failure. In case of a spike in usage, inclreasing the capacity of the application is a matter of a few mouse clicks. Demand decreased? You can scale it back down to save money. You pay for what you use per day. All that at a price that is affordable even for the youngest startup.
AppCloud provides a solution to much bigger systems, or systems requiring complete separation from other systems. It also allows limiting access from specific networks, allowing it to serve as an extension to corporate internal networks. It is based on a fully interactive drag and drop based interface that let the user arrange a fully managed cloud in a few minutes. After saving the design and clicking the launch button, a fully configured and managed cloud is available within 10-15 minutes. Applications can then be deployed to the cloud and be managed from the same control panel used for AppSpace. This also makes it very easy to have multiple development/test/staging/production systems with different capabilities, but with a shared deployment method, and easy switching from one to the other.
Give it a try. Seeing for yourself how easy it is to deploy, will take down the last barrier between your idea and a fully running, globally available and scalable application.