Specific Answers to Important Questions
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: Is Apprenda a Service?
Apprenda is not offered as a service. Apprenda is, however, a deploy anywhere PaaS stack that when licensed and deployed to some infrastructure, it provides an organization with their own Private PaaS. Apprenda is sold as a product that can be deployed in traditional datacenters, on top of virtualization, and in the cloud. When Apprenda is deployed ontop of something like Amazon’s EC2, you essentially end up with a public PaaS style deployment since its deployed on public IaaS. 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.
Q: 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.
Q: Does my application have to adhere to specific user interface guidelines, or is my user interface limited in any way?
Unlike some SaaS platforms out there today, Apprenda user interfaces are not part of a platform-wide dashboard or plugin architecture. Since developing for Apprenda adheres to the practice of separation of user interfaces from business logic, you are free to use your user interface framework of choice. Of course, you can build an application using traditional ASP.NET WebForms, or the new ASP.NET MVC Framework, but you are not limited to these. You can build your user interface using a client javascript framework such as ExtJS, YUI, or MooTools. You can even utilize rich content frameworks such as Flash or Silverlight.
Q: Does Apprenda 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.
Q: 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.
Q: How is Apprenda Express different than the established Apprenda?
For, details on the differences between the two products, you can refer to the Apprenda licensing matrix.
Q: 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.
Q: 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.
Q: But can’t I get 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.
Q: 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.
