News

AppScale Provides FastStart for AWS App Deployment

• By David Ramel
• 05/12/2015

Though its rapid application development platform is based on Google App Engine, AppScale Systems Inc. today announced a tool to help users deploy apps on the competing Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud.

AppScale FastStart helps both AWS and Google Cloud Platform users quickly and easily deploy their apps.

"In less than 10 minutes, FastStart users can deploy and start their App Engine applications on top of AppScale using Google Compute Engine or Amazon Web Services," the company said in a news release today. "FastStart for GCE and AWS are the latest easy deployment options for App Engine applications on AppScale."

The AppScale platform is an open source implementation of Google App Engine, a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering that developers can use to build and run applications on Google infrastructure.

But in AppScale's cloud vendor-agnostic "take your apps everywhere" approach, developers can use its platform to run their apps on any physical or cloud infrastructure they choose, when they choose.

And despite recently strengthening its ties with Google, AppScale is covering its bases and providing guidance on how to run apps on AWS, the unquestioned market leader in the cloud space.

This guidance comes in a detailed page with instructions for running AppScale FastStart on AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances.

AppScale also provides source code on GitHub along with instructions for those who want to set up AppScale on some other cloud.

Among those other clouds are IBM SoftLayer, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, Digital Ocean, OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus, KVM, Xen, VirtualBox and VMWare.

For development, the AppScale platform supports the common Google App Engine programming languages: PHP, Python, Java and Go, with the Cassandra NoSQL database being listed as the default data store for the open source project on GitHub.

The Santa Barbara, Calif.-based AppScale claims more than 6 million apps built with its platform are running worldwide, listing customers such as The World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Natixis Global Asset Management, Chico's FAS and BetterCloud.

"Our customers love that they can use AppScale to standardize application development -- taking advantage of the rapid development, scalability and efficiency of the AppScale development model while gaining the confidence that their apps are portable across all infrastructures," said Woody Rollins, CEO of AppScale. "There is a reason why the most innovative companies are leveraging the App Engine model. It is all about speed to market and using technology as a competitive advantage. Period."