Media release: Amsterdam, August 29, 2011

Hundreds of web servers online with a single click - Platform as a Service developed by Contrail

Imagine your brilliant idea turns out to be so succesful that you need to go from one web server to a thousand in a couple of hours. The Cloud is the answer. But it would demand experts packaging your application and writing scripts to manage the Cloud. Well, this was before ConPaaS. With ConPaaS, bringing hundreds of web servers and application servers on-line is done with no more than a single mouse click.

"No, it is not publicly available just yet, but we are close to releasing an Alpha version", says Guillaume Pierre from the VU Amsterdam. He is all too aware that the industry has allready shown interest in ConPaaS, and it appears to be the solution for a great demand. Pierre leads a  research group on large-scale distributed systems at VU University Amsterdam, and he is the leader of Platform-as-a-Service efforts in the Contrail Project. Contrail is a large European project in which eleven organisations from six countries collaborate to transform the current heterogeneous Cloud into a federated, easy accessible homegeneous environment. ConPaaS is part of the software stack that Contrail will produce and it is the first component available.

"Once your bright idea really takes off, you're in desperate need of resources. Getting more resources is easy  using existing Cloud offerings, like Amazon EC2 or an OpenNebula based Cloud. But it is not as easy to deploy your application on these new resources, to package your application for different existing Cloud providers, or  to switch from one to the other without stopping your application. Here's where ConPaaS comes in: it provides Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) in a new and easy way".

Need another webserver? Just click +1 in the webserver menu. Need 100? Guess what you need to type. You can bring up PHP, Java Servlet and Database engines in no time with just a click of your mouse. ConPaaS bundles all relevant data in one screen and makes resources available with just one click.

Pierre: "Even our first demo's already sparked attention from the industry. We expect the first release  to be ready in a month. We will release the entire software in open-source, and there will also be a public testbed where anyone can try ConPaaS for free. Later in the Contrail Project we will integrate ConPaaS with other components like Cloud Federation and federated security to make ConPaaS even more widely applicable."
 

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