Enterprise private Platform-as-a-Service, according to Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuller, is this era’s application server. “And that means two things,” he said. “Make management and deployment of apps at scale easy, and make it easier for developers to build modern-architecture apps.”
To meet those goals, Apprenda today announced the ability to run Java applications on its platform—along with the .NET applications it already could run—to be better able to cover an organization’s application portfolio, Schuller said.
He said first-generation Platform-as-a-Service providers, based on Ruby and PHP, were more focused on individual developers and were not looking at an enterprise use case. But, he noted, “Public Platform-as-a-Service did an amazing job of educating developers, and created developer demand inside the enterprise for private PaaS.”
The advantages of private PaaS are well known. Organizations can keep their data secure, private and in close proximity. But the benefits of public PaaS—scalability, infrastructure cost savings, high availability—are equally well known. And, Schuller said, “We’ll see a meaningful transition of apps to public PaaS, but through a trusted provider.”
For example, he explained users could point an Apprenda instance at an Amazon EC2 account, and the public and private resources merge in Apprenda. Then, he added, rules can be set for where the applications are deployed, which now, he pointed out, is a business decision. “We need a model like this to digest the question of where to deploy apps,” he said.
Apprenda also announced that JPMorgan Chase is using Apprenda’s private PaaS to run its mission-critical application portfolio, made up of custom Java and .NET applications. According to the company, Apprenda is deployed at JPMC production sites around the globe, running 2,000 Java and .NET applications across servers totaling several terabytes of memory, and they are used by more than 430 development teams there.
