Appcara Inc. (HQ) Info 1551 McCarthy Blvd. Ste 104 sales@appcara.com Milpitas, CA 95035, USA www.appcara.com

Copyright © 2013 Appcara. All rights reserved. Specifications subject to change without notice. Appcara and the Appcara logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Appcara. All other trademarks used or mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.

AppStack for DevOps Point-and-click app provisioning and management for DevOps

Developers want access to agile, self-service infrastructure and application provisioning capabilities. The iterative process of making code changes and testing can be best performed in an environment that most closely matches the intended deployment model. Given today’s focus on virtual and cloud infrastructure, that means public and private cloud environments are often the best dev/test environments for SaaS-style apps. The ability to scale up to tens or even hundreds of servers and users using a distributed or multi-tiered architecture is nearly mandatory. On top of all that, its common to require the complexity of multiple application packages such as Apache and Java, and any of a wide range of database servers such as MySQL, Mongo, NoSQL – in addition to shared resources such as firewalls and load balancers. Developers will frequently iterate on this process of standing up and then tearing down these complex environments – obviously a time-consuming endeavor, that can impact the benefits and goal of the whole agile development process.

Agility for DevOps through Automation The need for automation for DevOps is very clear, as the repetitive steps of development and testing require rapid creation & decommissioning of application runtime environments. AppStack makes it very easy for DevOps to spin up application Workloads for testing, development, QA, even when code is being changed continually. AppStack does this by performing a real-time software installation every time a Workload is provisioned – all of the servers, software packages (and dependent packages such as Java or PHP) and code. DevOps can control what versions of code are deployed into a Workload through the use of normal source code repositories. This assures that the either the latest code is deployed into a new Workload, or specifically controlled versions – all by configuring AppStack to point at the desired software and pulling it real-time from the desired repository at the time of deployment.

 

 

Appcara Inc. (HQ) Info 1551 McCarthy Blvd. Ste 104 sales@appcara.com Milpitas, CA 95035, USA www.appcara.com

Copyright © 2013 Appcara. All rights reserved. Specifications subject to change without notice. Appcara and the Appcara logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Appcara. All other trademarks used or mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.

Complex Application Development Appcara takes a very different approach to automating the deployment and management of today’s multi-tier and distributed cloud applications. AppStack uses a model-driven approach to capture and assemble knowledge and structure of multi-tier applications in real-time, including the relationships between multiple servers and all of their configuration data.

The AppStack database model, termed the Configuration Repository, is then used to dynamically track and reflect any changes in the relationships and dependencies of the application, and to do so automatically as users make changes through the AppStack Portal. AppStack utilizes a powerful set of logic and workflows, termed the AppStack Dynamic Application Engine, to provide the automation layer, with an ability to provision applications consisting of a mix of components developed from different sources, in different languages, libraries and platforms. On top of that, AppStack provides complete application portability over both public and private infrastructure clouds. This allows applications to be deployed as a “one-click” operation into a choice of public or private cloud targets, as depicted in the image below.

 

 

Appcara Inc. (HQ) Info 1551 McCarthy Blvd. Ste 104 sales@appcara.com Milpitas, CA 95035, USA www.appcara.com

Copyright © 2013 Appcara. All rights reserved. Specifications subject to change without notice. Appcara and the Appcara logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Appcara. All other trademarks used or mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.

Workload Portability Across Public and Private Clouds AppStack makes it possible to copy (clone) full application Workloads across cloud environments with just a few clicks. The power of AppStack’s model-driven approach is demonstrated clearly in its ability to automate the copy of Workloads from cloud-to-cloud. This enables developers to use create as many dev and test environments as are needed, without the cumbersome steps typically needed to stand up multiple servers and install app packages. DevOps teams might select to use public cloud services such as AWS for their dev/test, and then use AppStack to easily copy the complete Workloads to any other cloud service or to an on-premises (private) cloud for production deployment. This creates a rapid and error-free method of standing up new environments can save DevOps teams multiple hours of manual time spent provisioning new environments, while eliminating errors that are often frustrating to find and debug. AppStack can also decommission Workloads with a single click, to truly create an agile development environment that fits the DevOps model and goals.

AppStack Deployment Model AppStack is an on-premises software solution that Enterprises can host on top of their own infrastructure orchestration layer, or on top of a private cloud environment. AppStack supports a number of cloud orchestration layers directly, including Citrix CloudPlatform, VMware vCloud ™ Director (VCD), CA Applogic®, Eucalyptus, IBM PureFlex System™ as well as public clouds such as Amazon Web Services, The Rackspace Cloud, the HP Cloud and the IBM Smart Cloud ™.