OpDemand, a provider of solutions for agile IT operations, announced it is shipping a cloud infrastructure management platform, designed to enable software development teams to leverage raw cloud infrastructure without being overwhelmed by technical complexity. OpDemand enables organizations to retain control over their underlying infrastructure, while providing an end-to-end solution for DevOps and agile IT operations.
The vendor anticipates customers running a range of applications, from core ERP systems to testing apps. "There is nothing preventing ERP running successfully in the cloud. SAP deploys solutions on Amazon's cloud extensively," Gabriel Monroy, CTO of OpDemand, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "I think there is still a false assumption that mission-critical apps must be kept on-premise. While it's true that certain issues like security compliance and I/O performance may necessitate on-premise deployments, by and large you're going to see higher availability utilizing a cloud provider like Amazon who boasts eight geographic regions with dozens of isolated data centers. The trick is managing it all."
Software developers, operations engineers and system administrators are encouraged to create a free OpDemand account, which provides access to the OpDemand web console, command-line utilities, REST API and library of infrastructure blueprints. OpDemand's library currently contains blueprints for a variety of popular cloud-based frameworks, including LAMP, Ruby on Rails, Django and Node.js.
A common application is employing the platform as a testbed, says Monroy. "Most OpDemand users start out with dev/test platforms which are later promoted to production," he explains. "Developers and operations engineers must get comfortable working in a cloud environment before they can justify production cloud deployments. Leveraging cloud infrastructure requires a different mindset and operations model, such as DevOps. The level of automation OpDemand provides can be jarring for some teams, so starting out with dev/test environments is really important."
OpDemand features a pay-as-you-go pricing model based on "platforms" - groups of infrastructure that provide a discrete service or application. OpDemand's free tier enables users to run one platform at a time in perpetuity. Each additional platform costs $0.10 per hour.
OpDemand provides a management layer atop Amazon Web Services that enables users to deploy and manage cloud infrastructure using a simple and intuitive web interface. OpDemand's open-source infrastructure blueprints provide popular cloud stacks that can be managed using five powerful controls: start, stop, deploy, clone and destroy. "We absolutely see OpDemand supporting other providers in the very near future, including private clouds," Monroy says. "However, today OpDemand is focused squarely on AWS. Amazon's cloud still has a large lead in terms of technical maturity, system reliability and developer mindshare."
More information is available from the OpDemand website at www.opdemand.com.