eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Pivotal has updated its Cloud Foundry-powered Platform as a Service (PaaS), Pivotal CF, with new enterprise features.
At the Cloud Foundry Summit in San Francisco today, Pivotal introduced new enterprise-grade capabilities for Pivotal CF, including the ability to automatically deploy applications into dual availability zones to build in redundancy across clouds; enhanced dashboards for real-time application status, events and logs; the ability for operations to create service plans for binding apps to existing enterprise data lakes; and developer data services for building next-gen apps. The Summit runs from June 9-11.
“Pivotal is committed to bringing PaaS to the enterprise in a way companies want to consume it,” said James Watters, vice president of product, marketing and ecosystems for Cloud Foundry at Pivotal, in a statement. “I’ve met with IT leaders across industries and hear consistently how they want to modernize their app portfolio with solutions that let them innovate faster and build modern, data driven apps. They also want the freedom to run apps on their own cloud or best-of-breed public clouds. This release of Pivotal CF was built to meet those needs for organizations of any size, across industries.”
This latest release comes eight weeks after the previous version as Pivotal is delivering on a rapid, continuous innovation cycle required in the Software as a Service (SaaS) world. Pivotal CF 1.3 will be available in the early third quarter of 2014.
“One of the driving forces behind shadow IT has been the mismatch between business needs for agility and IT’s reputation as the department of ‘no,'” said Donnie Berkholz, an analyst at RedMonk, in a statement. “Private PaaS has the potential to provide a high-productivity developer experience that’s a hallmark of PaaS in addition to the visibility and governance IT desires, by making IT’s needs transparent to developers. Pivotal’s efforts in building Cloud Foundry and its broader ecosystem put it in position to attack this opportunity.”
Indeed, with the new enterprise services, key components in the enterprise gain benefits for their constituencies. Enterprise IT operations teams get control, visibility and portability with applications that can be rapidly scaled, moved and added to popular infrastructure environments. Enterprise application development teams get choice and speed to build applications with a best-fit framework that avoids cloud lock-in. And CIOs get cost and infrastructure flexibility to run applications in a variety of cloud deployments that easily integrate with blended legacy and next-gen application portfolios, Pivotal officials said.
Enterprises running their businesses on aging, legacy systems are struggling to manage massive data loads and rapid cycles in the creation of modern applications. This is driving many to move to the cloud, as companies are seeing their businesses disrupted by start-ups leveraging the inexpensive compute, storage and networking advantages of cloud computing and focusing on building new applications that have created new markets, innovative products and new customer experiences, Pivotal said.
An enterprise-grade PaaS will enable companies to take advantage of cloud computing and to create fast, agile software-driven businesses. Pivotal CF addresses organizations’ operational concerns and security policies, providing the capability across hybrid cloud environments. Pivotal CF frees up enterprises to rapidly develop, run and manage their apps across any public or private cloud, the company said.
With the new multiple availability zones feature in Pivotal CF, applications can be automatically deployed into dual availability zones in an enterprise private cloud. As a result, enterprises are able to build redundancy into every application—tolerating up to a 50 percent loss of hardware capacity without downtime—and spanning multiple local data centers with ease.
Moreover, the product’s new audit and usage dashboard for platform administrators provides enhanced auditing capabilities including a dynamically updated application dashboard that provides developers and operators usage reports, real time application status, events and logs. In addition, Pivotal CF components can now be monitored with Java Management Extensions (JMX), which collects and exposes VM and system data to assist in troubleshooting.
Meanwhile, Pivotal also added new developer services for building next-generation apps, including Pivotal HD, which provides developers with dedicated Hadoop clusters in seconds. Regarding data services for developers, Redis, MongoDB, Neo4j, Riak CS and Apache Cassandra can be deployed by Pivotal CF as managed services to bind with applications. Pivotal also has provided new build packs for Go, Python and PHP, in addition to Java, Ruby and Node.js applications.