Specific Answers to Important Questions
Sometimes, marketing material just doesn’t cut it when it comes to directly answering specific questions. We’ve captured some of the more common questions we’ve heard and provided answers to them here. If we start to hear other questions regularly, we’ll be sure to add them here.
- What's the easiest way to understand Apprenda?
Conceptually, Apprenda parallels the operating system or the modern day application server; it defines a concrete layer that “sits below” your application and acts as a host for your application. As a hosting layer, Apprenda manages network resources while providing an environment that allows your application to function as a service offering even if it wasn’t written as one. Furthermore, very much like your operating system might provide you a control panel, Apprenda provides a variety of tools via the web to interact with your deployed application.
- Why would I want my own private PaaS? Doesn't that defeat the purpose behind PaaS?
No, it doesn’t defeat the purpose! PaaS in general is a better operating architecture for any datacenter. Having PaaS means that developers can build better apps faster, developers can be decoupled from IT intricacies, IT can get better efficiency from any infrastructure, and interactions between end users, developers and IT staff can be standardized without compromise. Public PaaS vendors rely on these values to run their businesses efficiently and is simply the best way to run apps on infrastructure. Since it is unlikely that every organization can put all of their apps on the public cloud (security concerns, regulatory concerns, performance, etc.), Apprenda offers a PaaS software layer so developers and enterprises can take advantage of these efficiencies in their own datacenters. All of this is positive value that an organization can extract from running their own PaaS.
- Does Apprenda replace my private cloud?
No! Apprenda can be layered ontop of your existing private cloud IaaS and virtualization investments to make them even better, allowing you to provide both infrastructure on-demand as well as an on-demand cloud application platform to developers. If you don’t have a private cloud, that’s fine too. Apprenda doesn’t rely on any specific virtualization technology; if you have Windows server OS’, you can run Apprenda.
- What's the primary value that I get from Apprenda?
Apprenda focuses on providing value in a few ways:
- Making developers more productive by removing the need to deal with application management tasks
- Making developers more productive by giving them a new but backwards compatible runtime, APIs and frameworks to build composite cloud applications
- Helping organizations increase value by providing a platform for modernizing most of their application portfolio to cloud with little or no effort
- Helping organizations acheive higher efficiency by improving utilization of infrastructure, improving utilization of server licenses, and automating complex application and IT management tasks
- Allowing IT to offer self-service application management and deployment to different development teams in the organization
- Is Apprenda a virtualization technology?
Apprenda is not a virtualization technology that uses machine images to perform its magic. Instead, Apprenda relies on a unique architecture to endow your application with specific functionality such as multi-tenancy. Virtualization normally helps solve certain types of scale and deployment issues, but is not a means for solving architecture challenges and does not provide any sort of delivery mechanics.
- Is Apprenda a service?
Apprenda is not offered as a service. Apprenda is, however, a deploy anywhere PaaS stack that when deployed to a Windows infrastructure, it provides that organization with their own Private PaaS. Apprenda is sold as a product that can be deployed in traditional datacenters, on top of virtualization, or in the cloud. When Apprenda is deployed ontop of something like Amazon’s EC2, you essentially end up with a private PaaS style deployment on public a IaaS. Should you choose, you could open an Apprenda instance to the general public and have a bonafide .NET public PaaS. At Apprenda, we believe that your hosting and operating decisions are very different than your architecture and engineering decisions, and that PaaS forces software projects to awkwardly make both decisions in tandem. We choose to give software projects the freedom to be deployed where they need to be while inheriting some of the world’s most unique and valuable platform benefits.
- Is Apprenda a grid?
Yes. Apprenda uses a distributed grid architecture to host web and SOA applications in a decentralized fashion, allowing for failure tolerance, easier scalability, and high availability.
- Does Apprenda (the company) host Apprenda applications?
No. Apprenda’s core competency is in building powerful PaaS technology. Apprenda is a new breed of cloud middleware that is licensed and installed on your own hardware, co-location space, cloud infrastructure, or any combination of infrastructure resources. Apprenda stitches your infrastructure resources together, creating a highly resilient peer to peer fabric.
- Can I test drive Apprenda?
Yes! You can download Apprenda Express edition, which is a free and feature rich product based on the full production Apprenda edition.
- How is Apprenda Express different than the standard Apprenda?
For, details on the differences between the two products, you can refer to the Apprenda licensing matrix. Essentially, they are the same product with a restriction on how large a deployment you can run.
- Is it appropriate to compare Apprenda to services like Amazon's EC2?
No. Apprenda is not virtualization technology so a comparison to Amazon’s EC2 is not appropriate. Services like EC2 provide a Resource as a Service offering that is closer to “bare metal.” Apprenda provides higher level functions that provide targeted architecture value.
- Is it appropriate to compare Apprenda to Azure?
Not really. Although Azure and Apprenda do many of the same things, Azure is a public PaaS offering that requires you to commit your applications to Azure from both a runtime and operating point of view. Apprenda is a portable solution, meaning you can layer it ontop of any infrastructure and instantly have a PaaS. In the enterprise, for example, Apprenda allows you to stitch together all those Windows servers you have laying around into your own internal PaaS, giving your developers ultimate accessibility with all the value of a public PaaS.
- But can't I get application multi-tenancy from other Cloud technologies like Azure or Amazon's EC2?
No. Technologies like Azure and EC2 are themselves multi-tenant, but do not endow your application with multi-tenancy, which is what Apprenda does. In other words, others can share the same infrastructure as you when running on those respective services. This does not mean your application becomes multi-tenant by being deployed to those services. Apprenda, however, endows your application with multi-tenancy, meaning you can specify tenant-isolation policies as configuration, and Apprenda transforms your software’s architecture to adhere to those policies. If running on on infrastructure services like EC2 or Azure without Apprenda, you will be required to deploy individual application silos for each customer, or build multi-tenancy from scratch.
- Do I need to learn a new programming language to build applications with Apprenda?
No. Apprenda lets you utilize Microsoft .NET languages to write code and provides a slim, simple yet very powerful API layer that allows the application to interact with Apprenda in certain explicit ways.
