AppScale is a software company offering cloud infrastructure software and services to enterprises, government agencies, contractors, and third-party service providers. The company commercially supports one software product, AppScale ATS, a managed hybrid cloud infrastructure software platform that emulates the core AWS APIs. In 2019, the company ended commercial support for its open-source serverless computing platform AppScale GTS, however, its source code remains freely available to the open-source community.

History

AppScale began as a research project at the

University of California, Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduates and 2,983 graduate students enrolled in 2021–2022. It is part of the U ...

Computer Science Department under the supervision of Professor Chandra Krintz. The project was originally funded by the NSF, with additional funding from

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

, IBM and

NIH The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...

. In 2012, co-founders Dr. Chandra Krintz, Chief Scientist, Dr. Navraj Chohan, Development Lead, and Woody Rollins, CEO founded AppScale Systems to commercialize the private PaaS AppScale technology. Rollins, a pioneer in private cloud infrastructure, was a co-founder and former CEO of Eucalyptus Systems. In 2014, Graziano Obertelli joined AppScale as VP of Operations from Eucalyptus Systems, where he was a co-founder. In 2017, Dimitrii Calzago joined AppScale as CTO from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, where he was Director of Cloud R&D. In April 2014, AppScale Systems was named a 2014 Cool Vendor in

PaaS Platform as a service (PaaS) or application platform as a service (aPaaS) or platform-based service is a category of cloud computing services that allows customers to provision, instantiate, run, and manage a modular bundle comprising a computing ...

Gartner, Inc. Gartner, Inc is a technological research and consulting firm based in Stamford, Connecticut that conducts research on technology and shares this research both through private consulting as well as executive programs and conferences. Its client ...

In September 2014, AppScale Systems won a Bossie Award from

InfoWorld ''InfoWorld'' (abbreviated IW) is an information technology media business. Founded in 1978, it began as a monthly magazine. In 2007, it transitioned to a web-only publication. Its parent company today is International Data Group, and its siste ...

for best open source data center and cloud software. AppScale partnered with Optimal Dynamics on April 11, 2016. AppScale was part of the AliLaunch Program, August 9, 2016. Chandra Kritz, Chief Science Officer of AppScale, was featured on Dev Radio in the episode titled "How to Rescue your apps with the help of AppScale" on December 16, 2016. In late 2017, AppScale Systems started offering commercial support for

Eucalyptus ''Eucalyptus'' () is a genus of over seven hundred species of flowering trees, shrubs or mallees in the myrtle family, Myrtaceae. Along with several other genera in the tribe Eucalypteae, including '' Corymbia'', they are commonly known as e ...

private cloud software after

DXC Technology DXC Technology is an American multinational information technology (IT) services and consulting company headquartered in Ashburn, Virginia. History DXC Technology was founded on April 3, 2017 when the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (HPE ...

chose to stop the development and support of Eucalyptus. This prompted AppScale, led by members of the Eucalyptus founding team, to fork the code and continue developing the software, which was renamed AppScale ATS.

AppScale ATS

AppScale ATS (formerly

) is a managed hybrid cloud infrastructure software that emulates the core AWS APIs. AppScale ATS implements AWS-compatible cloud services over dedicated infrastructure, providing a dedicated private AWS region. ATS enables the creation of cost-effective and flexible AWS hybrid cloud environments with a seamless experience for developers and workloads across public and private resources. No special-purpose hardware or unorthodox operating system configurations are required and the entire software stack utilizes open-sourced components. The software is primarily used by enterprises and government agencies to place data and compute in specific geographies (for compliance) or close to data sources (for latency).

AppScale GTS

AppScale GTS is an open-source

serverless computing Serverless computing is a cloud computing execution model in which the cloud provider allocates machine resources on demand, taking care of the servers on behalf of their customers. "Serverless" is a misnomer in the sense that servers are still ...

platform that automatically deploys and scales unmodified

Google App Engine Google App Engine (often referred to as GAE or simply App Engine) is a cloud computing platform as a service for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers. Applications are sandboxed and run across multiple server ...

applications over public and private clouds, as well as on-premises clusters. AppScale is modeled on the App Engine APIs and has support for Go,

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mos ...

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group. ...

, and

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...

applications. The goal of AppScale is to provide developers with a rapid,

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...

-driven development platform that can run applications on any cloud infrastructure. AppScale decouples app logic from its service ecosystem to give developers and cloud administrators control over app deployment, data storage, resource use, backup and migration. The platform allows developers to focus on the business logic of building scalable applications, freeing them from the need to concentrate on deployment and scaling logic. AppScale decouples app logic from its service ecosystem to give developers and cloud administrators control over app deployment, data storage, resource use, backup, and migration. AppScale includes high-level APIs for persistence, asynchronous execution, distributed memory cache, user authentication, and more. It handles service discovery, load-balancing, fault-tolerance, and auto-scaling. It also allows IT operations and cloud administrators to provide a consistent, tunable environment for running and maintaining apps on multiple cloud infrastructures. AppScale was developed and maintained by AppScale Systems, Inc., based in

Santa Barbara, California Santa Barbara ( es, Santa Bárbara, meaning "Saint Barbara") is a coastal city in Santa Barbara County, California, of which it is also the county seat. Situated on a south-facing section of coastline, the longest such section on the West Co ...

, and Google.Lee, Justin. (2013-06-28

The WHIR. Retrieved on 2014-07-10.

Open source components

* Datastore API:

Apache Cassandra Cassandra is a free and open-source, distributed, wide-column store, NoSQL database management system designed to handle large amounts of data across many commodity servers, providing high availability with no single point of failure. Cassand ...

and

Apache ZooKeeper Apache ZooKeeper is an open-source server for highly reliable distributed coordination of cloud applications. It is a project of the Apache Software Foundation. ZooKeeper is essentially a service (systems architecture), service for distributed co ...

* Memcache API:

memcached Memcached (pronounced variously ''mem-cash-dee'' or ''mem-cashed'') is a general-purpose distributed memory-caching system. It is often used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in RAM to reduce the number of ...

* Task Queue API:

RabbitMQ RabbitMQ is an open-source message-broker software (sometimes called message-oriented middleware) that originally implemented the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) and has since been extended with a plug-in architecture to support Str ...

and

Celery Celery (''Apium graveolens'') is a marshland plant in the family Apiaceae that has been cultivated as a vegetable since antiquity. Celery has a long fibrous stalk tapering into leaves. Depending on location and cultivar, either its stalks, ...

* XMPP API:

ejabberd ejabberd is an Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) application server and an MQ Telemetry Transport (MQTT) broker, written mainly in the Erlang programming language. It can run under several Unix-like operating systems such as ma ...

* Channel API: ejabberd * Blobstore API: Apache Cassandra and Apache ZooKeeper * Images API:

Python Imaging Library Python Imaging Library is a free and open-source additional library for the Python programming language that adds support for opening, manipulating, and saving many different image file formats. It is available for Windows, and Linux. The lat ...

(PIL) * Cron API: Crontab * HAProxy:

HAProxy HAProxy is a free and open source software that provides a high availability load balancer and reverse proxy for TCP and HTTP-based applications that spreads requests across multiple servers. It is written in C and has a reputation for being fa ...

Supported platforms

Amazon EC2 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon.com's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment of ...

CloudStack CloudStack is open-source cloud computing software for creating, managing, and deploying infrastructure cloud services. It uses existing hypervisor platforms for virtualization, such as KVM, VMware vSphere, including ESXi and vCenter, and ...

DigitalOcean DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. () is an American multinational technology company and cloud service provider. The company is headquartered in New York City, New York, USA, with 15 globally distributed data centers worldwide. DigitalOcean provide ...

Google Compute Engine Google Compute Engine (GCE) is the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) component of Google Cloud Platform which is built on the global infrastructure that runs Google's search engine, Gmail, YouTube and other services. Google Compute Engine en ...

Kernel-based Virtual Machine Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is a virtualization module in the Linux kernel that allows the kernel to function as a hypervisor. It was merged into the mainline Linux kernel in version 2.6.20, which was released on February 5, 2007. KV ...

(KVM) * Microsoft Azure *

OpenStack OpenStack is a free, open standard cloud computing platform. It is mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are made available to users. The software pl ...

RackSpace Rackspace Technology, Inc. is an American cloud computing company based in Windcrest, Texas, an inner suburb of San Antonio, Texas. The company also has offices in Blacksburg, Virginia, and Austin, Texas, as well as in Australia, Canada, United ...

SoftLayer IBM Cloud, (formerly known as Bluemix) is a set of cloud computing services for business offered by the information technology company IBM. Services As of 2021, IBM Cloud contains more than 170 services including compute, storage, networki ...

(IBM) * Xen

Supported languages

* Go *

External links

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Appscale Cloud platforms Free software for cloud computing Virtualization software for Linux