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Compose, an IBM company, announced that it will release new hosted services this month to provide application developers with additional tools for building Web and mobile apps.
The new services are CoreOS etcd and RabbitMQ, which will complement Compose’s existing offerings, which include MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Redis, PostgreSQL and RethinkDB.
Compose provides a production database service that thousands of companies around the world use to build and run their application back-end services.
CoreOS etcd is a data store built for high availability using the RAFT Consensus Algorithm to ensure consistency to help developers build distributed applications. It provides a key component for Compose customers to use alongside other databases to build highly available applications, the company said.
RabbitMQ is a message queue that works in conjunction with other systems for passing data between each system. Message queues like RabbitMQ make it easier to run applications more efficiently and effectively at scale.
At one time, businesses had only a few choices for running their applications, but the number of available tools, particularly open-source databases, has expanded rapidly. Yet many companies lack the necessary in-house expertise to run all these tools at scale while also including all the safeguards—such as failover and reliable backups—so they can be production-ready, Compose said.
“There are so many fantastic tools for building modern, scalable applications, but it’s time- and resource-consuming to set up all these services,” Kurt Mackey, CEO and co-founder at Compose, said in a statement. “Our platform makes it easy to provide production-quality services without the overhead so developers can get back to doing what they do best: building applications. The new services will help us to round out our database offerings, with new tools for building highly scalable Web and mobile applications with etcd and RabbitMQ.”
Each new Compose service will be built atop the same platform used by Compose’s other core databases.
IBM acquired Compose in July to accelerate developer productivity and innovation around open-source and cloud data services. The acquisition of Compose came on the heels of IBM announcing several new initiatives to fuel open cloud innovation, including contributing technology and developers to open-source cloud projects across analytics, mobile and cloud data services. It also came a year after IBM acquired Cloudant, another DBaaS provider.
“Compose’s breadth of database offerings will expand IBM’s Bluemix platform for the many app developers seeking production-ready databases built on open source,” Derek Schoettle, general manager of IBM Cloud Data Services and former CEO of Cloudant, said in a statement after the acquisition. “Compose furthers IBM’s commitment to ensuring developers have access to the right tools for the job by offering the broadest set of DBaaS services and the flexibility of hybrid cloud deployment.”
Compose provides constant database monitoring and management by DBaaS and DevOps experts. The company’s platform features “containerized” DBaaS platform technology to allow for fast deployment and scaling of popular open-source DBaaS services for customers. It also features built-in redundancy, backup and failover for uninterrupted DBaaS service and application uptime. And it offers add-ons such as Compose Transporter, which helps developers move data between services like MongoDB and Elasticsearch for easier application development.
“IBM is really serious about fleshing out their cloud services,” Rob Enderle, founder of the Enderle Group and longtime IBM watcher, said after IBM acquired Compose. “Compose has a very powerful cloud open-source database platform which, coupled with IBM’s database knowledge and IP, could become the leading cloud database offering. IBM is moving massively to become the leading cloud services provider, and to get there continues to cherry-pick firms to flesh out their offerings. This acquisition is in support of that strategy.”
Meanwhile, new users can employ all of Compose’s services free for 30 days, including the two newly announced ones that will be available in beta on Compose’s Website this month. After the 30-day trial period, users pay a monthly service fee based on the amount of data stored.