Apprenda, a startup that’s bet big on a .NET-focused private Platform as a Service, is branching out. With its new Apprenda 4.0 release, the company says it can connect on-premises environments running Windows Server 2012 with Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services resources as needed.
“We’ve been focused on private and now more people are talking about hyrid and want to start moving some workloads into the public cloud,” Sinclair Schuller, Apprenda CEO told me recently. “Now they can install Apprenda in their data center and point it to Amazon or Azure and direct workloads as needed and manage them all from one dashboard.”
Now that it’s integrated with Microsoft System Center 2012, Apprenda can run across multiple private or public or hosted data centers and be managed centrally.
If this theme doesn’t sound familiar by now, get used to it. We’ll hear a lot more about hybrid clouds this week at the AWS: Reinvent and Cloudbeat conferences this week.
Apprenda’s single-language PaaS is something of an anomaly among PaaS providers like Heroku, Cloud Foundry and Appfog, all of which have rushed to embrace as many languages and frameworks as possible. (Cloudbees, a Java-centric PaaS, is another outlier.)
Schuller says Apprenda’s more targeted approach means it can concentrate on a treasure trove of existing .NET applications — many custom built — that run businesses. Early Apprenda customers include Diebold, the big ATM and financial services company.
Because of strict compliance and governance rules, financial services companies like Diebold do not allow their developers to tap into public cloud platforms. Not only will it not pay for any AWS workloads if developers submit expense accounts for them, it disables access to AWS or other public clouds, said Balaji Devarasetty, director of cloud services for the North Canton, Ohio based company.
What Devarasetty likes about Apprenda is that it will enable Diebold to take older .NET applications and impart some multi-tenancy and other cloud attributes to them, preserving their useful life, he said. And it can use Apprenda to build totally new cloud-based applications, which it will run in a private cloud. Over time, however, as companies get more comfortable with public cloud, he does see some use cases moving there and Apprenda leaves that door open.
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