It takes a lot to get CloudCovered to sit through a conference on service-oriented architectures. Watching paint dry sounds more fun. But it looks like I missed some interesting cloud-related announcements at IBM’s annual SOA shindig.
It was only a matter of time of course, but here, courtesy of IBM, is the world’s first cloud-in-a-box offering, dubbed the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance. This is IBM’s attempt to make is easier to build private clouds by providing a dedicated appliance that can be use for developing, testing and ultimately deploying cloud-ready apps.
Big Blue is presenting the CloudBurst as a platform as a service concept similar to the platform offerings that some vendors are now offering to developers on the public cloud — see this Sun announcement, for example.
The appliance stores virtualised images of “cloud-ready” applications that will typically run across various servers in different locations on the private cloud. The deployment of these apps is handled by Websphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition, a new virtualised version of IBM’s WebSphere application server and the appliance comes with a copy already installed. Just like the apps it serves, the WebSphere Application Server Hypervisor Edition is also stored as a virtualised image that can be called on demand.
According to IBM, the CloudBurst is designed to end the headaches of creating private clouds. Once an app has been tested and configured to run with a particular operating system, a version of the virtualised app is “frozen” and stored on the appliance, where it can by quickly and easily deployed to any machine in the private cloud — but note that only IBM x86-based servers are supported .
In keeping with the SOA philosophy, the appliance logs the resources used in running a particular app for internal charge-back purposes, and it offers “seamless integration” with Tivoli and the Rational development tools. So now there are no excuses for not getting that private cloud project up and running, are there?
Well, price could be one. The CloudBurst Appliance with the new virtualised version of Websphere costs around $45,000.