AppFog, provider of a polyglot platform as a service for cloud-based application deployment and management, has announced its acquisition of Nodester, the provider of a PaaS for the Node.js environment.
Lucas Carlson, CEO of AppFog, said the move not only further consolidates the PaaS industry, but also enhances AppFog’s large active community of developers. AppFog supports Java, .NET, Node.js, Python, PHP, Ruby and more â with Node.js its fastest growing community, Carlson told eWEEK. Now the company gets a hold of Nodester after 40 percent growth in developer adoption in the last 30 days, AppFog said.
“This deal means that Nodester users will be able to now use the same PaaS for their Ruby and Java apps that they use for their Node apps,” said Chris Matthieu, founder of Nodester, in a statement.
Though announced Aug. 29, the acquisition closed on Aug. 20 and financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. AppFog has raised about $10 million in funding and continues to use it to bolster the company’s PaaS strategy.
Carlson said Nodester has the largest actively engaged community of Node.js users in PaaS and was the first open-source PaaS for Node.js. It works the same in public and private clouds. It also brings WebSocket support to AppFog.
“Nodester’s commitment to building an open source PaaS and their vision for PaaS aligns perfectly with AppFog and Cloud Foundry philosophies,” said Krishnan Subramanian, founder and principal analyst at Rishidot Research, in a statement. “AppFog is using the Nodester intellectual property to collaborate with VMware in delivering WebSocket support to Cloud Foundry. It is clear that polyglot and infrastructure agnostic PaaS solutions are the future of PaaS. As enterprise acceptance of PaaS continues to ramp up it is likely that we will see a wave of consolidation.”
“AppFog was incredibly impressed from day one with the market-leading community that Nodester has built,” Carlson said in a statement. “And now that Node is now tied with PHP for having the most number of applications running – so bringing our operational excellence and poly-infrastructure support to the loyal Nodester users; is a win for everyone.”
AppFog will keep Nodester running as an independent service until WebSocket support is integrated into AppFog later this year, at which time the applications will move into the AppFog infrastructure, giving Nodester users access to all the features of AppFog including cross-cloud vendor compatibility, Carlson said.
The acquisition is beneficial to all developers involved, Carlson said. Nodester users will now be able to deploy apps to a wide range of different infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers. AppFog’s Node.js developers gain WebSocket support and a stronger community and ecosystem. And the PaaS developers gain from the consolidation down to an enhanced option.
“In looking at serving our core users as best as possible, we felt that joining up with a larger player would give Node developers the very best PaaS solution as Node continues to grow and extend into the enterprise,” Matthieu said. “When we looked at the various leading PaaS providers out there it became clear that the only one with the sort of vision and mission that matched up to what we believe was AppFog.”
