Now the company has upped the ante by adding support for the popular JBoss and Apache Tomcat web servers which means deeper support for more Java applications, said Sinclair Schuller, CEO of Troy, N.Y.-based Apprenda.
“JBoss is used for some really mission-critical enterprise apps — internal and external-facing, so [this addition] means that we now offer more first-class support for more mission-critical apps than any other vendor,” Schuller claimed.
JBoss support also puts Apprenda into more direct competition with JBoss-owner Red Hat, which is pushing its OpenShift PaaS. Another contender in the private PaaS arena is the Pivotal CF implementation of Cloud Foundry. Private PaaSes run on a company’s internal infrastructure or private cloud, whereas public PaaSes run on public, shared infrastructure like Amazon Web services.
The Apprenda 5.5 release gives users one dashboard for managing Java and .Net applications configured to deploy on JBoss. And, added support for Oracle Java Management Extensions (JMX) means developers can monitor Java application instances from their dashboard as well.
PaaS has been a fluid market with CloudBees, a Java-focused PaaS, bowing out of that business to focus on Jenkins-based continuous deployment; Salesforce.com fields two PaaSes in Force.com and Heroku, which it is trying to bridge.
Indeed some pundits argue that the advent of container technologies, especially Docker, that let developers build an application once and deploy it in many environments, make a full-featured PaaS overkill for many situations — an assessment that Apprenda, Pivotal CF, and others would likely dispute.
