DreamFactory Software, the creators of the fast-growing open source DreamFactory REST API backend, announced the release of DreamFactory Enterprise. A new commercial software package, DreamFactory Enterprise gives users the ability to easily deploy, manage and transport multiple instances of DreamFactory across the entire application development lifecycle. Designed for enterprise development and IT teams, software development agencies, systems integrators, independent software vendors, managed service providers, and cloud infrastructure-as-a-service companies, DreamFactory Enterprise empowers development teams to provision, govern and report on DreamFactory instances so they can accelerate modern application development and deployment on a well-governed infrastructure.

“From mobile computing to the Internet of Things, it’s all about the API. DreamFactory automates the creation of APIs, and now DreamFactory Enterprise enables businesses to scale the concept across the entire development lifecycle. With this announcement, DreamFactory is making it easier for developers to mobilize backend assets and broadly deploy modern applications,” said David S. Linthicum, consultant at Cloud Technology Partners.

BYOD, changing application integration patterns, developer empowerment and open source software are transforming today’s IT environment

With the prevailing mega-trends of mobility and BYOD, Gartner expects that by 2017, the market demand for mobile app development services will grow at least five times faster than the capacity of internal IT organizations to service that demand.1 Gartner also expects that by 2020, lightweight web and mobile-style app integration will completely displace traditional approaches.2 To meet this exploding demand for mobile apps and services, and with mobile extending out to IoT, Gartner is advising clients to adopt an agile API layer that will optimize mobile integration and simplify the process of connecting mobile apps to many different types of data sources.3

At the same time, the shift to developer empowerment (developers, rather than CIOs, are increasingly driving adoption of new software technologies), and the growing popularity of open source software, have placed technology decision-making lower in the enterprise hierarchy. Increasingly, developers and line-of-business (LOB) organizations are demanding greater freedom in how they develop and deliver business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-partner (B2P), and selected business-to-employee (B2E) mobile apps that impact their digital business activities. In light of these trends, Gartner notes that by de-coupling front-end development activities from back-end services, IT organizations will enable a better portfolio of mobile apps while enabling third parties to LOB units to rapidly create effective client apps with strong user experiences.4

DreamFactory on a trajectory defined by other successful open-source companies

DreamFactory’s engineers set out to tackle a large and growing problem faced by developers: how to quickly get reliable REST APIs for a growing variety of data sources to fuel development of modern mobile, web, and IoT applications. In 2013, DreamFactory released the DreamFactory REST API backend as open source on GitHub under the Apache license. With its ability to automatically and securely expose REST API endpoints for a wide range of data sources, the DreamFactory backend has been widely adopted. Hundreds of thousands of developers now use DreamFactory to get secure, RESTful access to data while dramatically cutting development time and costs.

As with other open source software (OSS) companies such as Docker, MongoDB, Elastic, CoreOS, Mesosphere and NGINX, DreamFactory is building on successful developer-led adoption of its open source software with a compelling commercial offering to grow the business and better support the expanding user community. DreamFactory Enterprise allows the company to grow and move forward without compromising the original open source software stack on which developers depend to provide RESTful services.

“DreamFactory has become a fundamental piece of software located right at the heart of the new stack. Very simply, it connects any data source to any device in seconds. Developers love the fact that this is free, open source software that be installed on any cloud or server,” said Bill Appleton, CEO of DreamFactory. “But enterprise customers looking for API standardization, automation, compliance, and governance need a better way to manage multiple instances of the open source product across the development lifecycle. And so we’re thrilled to introduce DreamFactory Enterprise to address that need.”

DreamFactory Enterprise: DreamFactory management made easy

DreamFactory Enterprise makes it easy to provision, govern, and report on multiple DreamFactory instances used across the development lifecycle — all from a single management platform. DreamFactory Enterprise ensures that all DreamFactory instances are fully managed, secure, compliant, and predictable in cost at the critical API layer. Features include:

  • Cluster management: DreamFactory Enterprise makes it easy to host many DreamFactory instances on a single server cluster. A cluster is a set of assigned web servers, app servers, and database servers. Use the web console or command line to easily set up different clusters, for example development clusters, test clusters, and production clusters.
  • Instance management: An “instance” is the DreamFactory open source runtime. It is common to deploy multiple instances, for example separate instances for development, test and production. DreamFactory Enterprise allows users to run many instances on the same server cluster, substantially reducing infrastructure costs and saving time.
  • API reporting with ELK: DreamFactory Enterprise comes with the popular ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) for API logging and reporting. All API calls are automatically logged and searchable with Elasticsearch. Kibana provides powerful reporting features and pre-built dashboards to view API traffic by cluster, instance, application, end user, API endpoint, and more.
  • API management: To improve security and reduce costs, it is important to manage API limits. DreamFactory Enterprise IT teams you to specify API limit policies at the cluster, instance, and individual user level. Each instance adheres to API limit policies and dynamically throttles API call traffic at runtime. This provides protection against unwarranted API calls (eg. DDoS attacks) and provides cost control at the critical API layer.
  • User management: Any significant development project involves teams of developers and IT building, testing, deploying and maintaining applications across development, test, and production environments. DreamFactory Enterprise enables architects, engineering managers, and IT to manage team access to each DreamFactory instance, from individual development instances to large production instances.

DreamFactory Enterprise is available now. A free starter edition can be used to evaluate basic DreamFactory Enterprise features. Subscriptions for multi-instance DreamFactory management and larger numbers of apps and users are priced separately.