HostReview.com Web Hosting Interviews

An Interview with
Gabriel Wong, Chief Architect/Founder, cloudAPPy.

October 20, 2008

cloudAPPy is a Drag-and-drop hosting cloud service for easy deployment of applications in a load-balanced high availability environment. The service cuts down deployment time by providing an advanced easy-to-use web control, that with a drag of the mouse, enables users to quickly deploy applications to load-balanced clusters of application servers.

Please tell us about yourself, and how you got involved with cloudAPP.

After being involved with application hosting at various levels, Cloud services was a natural progression or extension of our core competencies.

Because in the end, it is all about providing the finest quality of service through technology.

Cloud hosting is essentially web hosting 5.0.

How would you describe the service to a non-technical audience?

cloudAPPy delivers always-on web presence with the ability to seamlessly scale as traffic grows without needing to hire IT staff.

What kinds of clients do you target? What level of technical competence does using cloudAPPy require?

Developers with the skill-set to develop standards based applications.

Our service is designed for those same developers looking for an affordable cloud solution and who do not have the time and resources to spend on setting up and managing high availability load-balanced infrastructure like the bigger guys.

What were the greatest challenges in developing the service?

Coming up with a solution that would work across multiple technologies and yet satisfy the core value preposition. This required various compromises.

In order for the cloudAPPy service to work for various programming languages and frameworks, it had to be generic and heterogeneous enough to minimize the steps required to deploy and manage applications in a high-availability environment.

How does a small company plan to compete in a market where large companies are also developing their own cloud computing offerings? What are your selling points?

Well if you look at the Cloud landscape, most of the top players are Cloud infrastructure providers.

In fact our service is Cloud infrastructure agnostic. That is depending on customer preference, they can specify their application be deployed at clouds residing on Amazon EC2 or GoGrid.

There are few players at the application cloud layer (otherwise known as hosting cloud).

Even so, they have a lot to be desired in terms of technology, process and price.

We offer true Load-balancing, that includes sticky-session support, most other hosting cloud providers only provide passive load-balancing or DNS based round-robin. Our drag-and-drop  cloud manager enables an easier deployment and management environment.

Our cloud manager automates many of the steps required to get up and running in a Cloud environment.

Our pricing starts at $20 per month, which is a fraction of the cost of other providers.

In addition database support includes RDBMS based on open standards such as ANSI SQL.

This ensures that our customers applications are not tied to any proprietary system, thus creating a portability environment that would allow customers to move their applications elsewhere.

We allow our customers to deploy multiple applications and domains.

Other providers restrict customers to 1 application or domain per account.

What website and web application technologies does cloudAPPy support?

We provide high performance hosting technologies for applications developed with JAVA, RAILS, and PHP programming languages. Back-ended by MySQL database clusters.

And Load balanced by Apache (mod_proxy).

Customers applications are run under private virtual machines (PVM). The PVMs loads the applications into its own memory space for faster performance.

What we expect from cloudAPPy in the coming months?

The ability to seamlessly move over to another cloud infrastructure either completely or partially.

The ability to split services across multiple clouds create an extra level of reliability in case of disasters. Also other programming language support, such as python.

Finally, what are your recommendations to people looking to host their website or application in the cloud?

Portable and database agnostic applications will easily integrate into hosting clouds.

The hosting cloud should be compatible with standard applications. That is no proprietary database or programming API.

On the design side, applications should follow proper design patterns as it is even more critical in a cloud environment.

Dynamic content should be database driven instead of disk or file driven . There should be no hard coded references to application resources, such as database or disk access because in a cloud the application may be distributed anywhere within the cloud.

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