Elastra

Elastra (www.elastra.com) is a company with an interesting kind of cloud-based middleware. It was founded by serial entrepreneur Kirill Sheynkman, who successfully sold companies to IBM and to BEA. Elastra is funded by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, an experienced venture capital firm who invests almost exclusively in software and middleware and lately has been investing heavily in Software as a Service (SAAS) and in cloud computing. John Hummer sits on their board.

Elastra aims to help you easily overcome the challenges of scalability in the cloud, by making it seem almost transparent to you:

The Elastra Cloud Server gives your IT organization the ability to:

» Rapidly model and provision application infrastructure
» Automate changes to the system deployment process
»Efficiently utilize internal, external, and virtualized IT resources on demand
» Enforce IT policy rules

Elastra has three design goals for an end-to-end cloud design approach:
» Separated Applications from Infrastructure, through modeling the application in terms of its architecture and infrastructure requirements without tying the application to a specific set of underlying infrastructure

» Enabling Computer-Assisted Modeling and Control Automation, provided by a set of control agents and user-guided by graphical design tools. This could help IT architects and operators determine design constraints on the application, match the design to the underlying infrastructure, and enable goal-driven automation to deploy, scale, or recover their IT systems on demand.

» Explicit Collaboration To Enact Changes, through models that codify, relate, and analyze the constraints and preferences that are appropriate to stakeholders across enterprise IT—from architects and developers, through operators, administrators, and managers.

Source: www.elastra.com/technology/reference-architecture-introduction

Elastra has defined a set of modeling languages and a reference architecture and has built an implementation that integrates both existing and emerging IT automation and management servers. This work is based on a set of eight characteristics desirable for an information system that addresses cloud application design and operations problems holistically. These characteristics are listed in Elastra's Reference Architecture introduction, available at www.elastra.com/technology/reference-architecture-introduction (accessed July 20, 2010).


Elastra for Amazon Web Services

Model Open Source Infrastructure
Use the design workbench to quickly and easily create a variety of reusable application infrastructure designs. Create anything from an Apache web farm to a J2EE stack, or just a design with a single piece of software.

Deploy to Amazon Web Services
Automate the deployment of models with a click of a button. Quickly generate end-to-end, executable, model-driven deployment plans that streamline provisioning of EC2 resources and open source components such as Apache, JBoss, Tomcat and MySQL.

Source: www.elastra.com/products/elastra-for-aws

Source of Information : Implementing and Developing Cloud Computing Applications 2011

Elastra