AppScale is a software company that offers cloud infrastructure software and services to enterprises, government agencies, contractors, and third-party service providers. The company commercially supports one software product, AppScale ATS, a managed hybrid cloud infrastructure software platform that emulates the core AWS APIs. In 2019, the company ended commercial support for its open-source serverless computing platform AppScale GTS, but AppScale GTS source code remains freely available to the open-source community.

History

AppScale began as a research project at the

University of California, Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Barbara County, California, United States. Tracing its roots back to 1891 as an ...

Computer Science Department under the supervision of Professor Chandra Krintz. The project was originally funded by the NSF, with additional funding from

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

and NIH. In 2012, co-founders Dr. Chandra Krintz, Chief Scientist, Dr. Navraj Chohan, Development Lead, and Woody Rollins, CEO founded AppScale Systems to commercialize the private PaaS AppScale technology. Rollins, a pioneer in private cloud infrastructure, was a co-founder and former CEO of Eucalyptus Systems. In 2014, Graziano Obertelli joined AppScale as VP of Operations from Eucalyptus Systems, where he was a co-founder. In 2017, Dimitrii Calzago joined AppScale as CTO from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, where he was Director of Cloud R&D. In April 2014, AppScale Systems was named a 2014 Cool Vendor in

PaaS Platform as a service (PaaS) or application platform as a service (aPaaS) or platform-based service is a cloud computing service model where users provision, instantiate, run and manage a modular bundle of a computing platform and applications, w ...

by Gartner, Inc. In September 2014, AppScale Systems won a Bossie Award from

InfoWorld ''InfoWorld'' (''IW'') is an American information technology media business. Founded in 1978, it began as a monthly magazine. In 2007, it transitioned to a Web-only publication. Its parent company is International Data Group, and its sister pu ...

for best

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

data center and cloud software. AppScale partnered with Optimal Dynamics on April 11, 2016. AppScale was part of the AliLaunch Program, August 9, 2016. Chandra Krintz, Chief Science Officer of AppScale, was featured on Dev Radio in the episode titled "How to Rescue your apps with the help of AppScale" on December 16, 2016. In late 2017, AppScale Systems started offering commercial support for

Eucalyptus ''Eucalyptus'' () is a genus of more than 700 species of flowering plants in the family Myrtaceae. Most species of ''Eucalyptus'' are trees, often Mallee (habit), mallees, and a few are shrubs. Along with several other genera in the tribe Eucalyp ...

private cloud software after DXC Technology chose to stop the development and support of Eucalyptus. This prompted AppScale, led by members of the Eucalyptus founding team, to fork the code and continue developing the software, which was renamed AppScale ATS.

AppScale ATS

AppScale ATS (formerly

) is a managed hybrid cloud infrastructure software that emulates the core AWS APIs. AppScale ATS implements AWS-compatible cloud services over dedicated infrastructure, providing a dedicated private AWS region. ATS enables the creation of cost-effective and flexible AWS hybrid cloud environments with a seamless experience for developers and workloads across public and private resources. No special-purpose hardware or unorthodox operating system configurations are required and the entire software stack utilizes open-sourced components. The software is primarily used by enterprises and government agencies to place data and compute in specific geographies (for compliance) or close to data sources (for latency).

AppScale GTS

AppScale GTS is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

serverless computing Serverless computing is "a cloud service category in which the customer can use different cloud capability types without the customer having to provision, deploy and manage either hardware or software resources, other than providing customer appli ...

platform that automatically deploys and scales unmodified

Google App Engine Google App Engine (also referred to as GAE or App Engine) is a cloud computing platform used as a service for developing and hosting web applications. Applications are sandboxed and run across multiple Google-managed servers. GAE supports aut ...

applications over public and private clouds and on-premises clusters. AppScale is modeled on the App Engine APIs and supports Go,

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by the PHP Group. ...

, and Python applications. The platform has a rapid API-driven development environment that can run applications on any cloud infrastructure. It decouples app logic from its service ecosystem, allowing better control over app deployment, data storage, resource use, backup, migration, service discovery, load-balancing, fault-tolerance, and auto-scaling. AppScale was developed and maintained by AppScale Systems, Inc., based in

Santa Barbara, California Santa Barbara (, meaning ) is a coastal city in Santa Barbara County, California, of which it is also the county seat. Situated on a south-facing section of coastline, the longest such section on the West Coast of the United States excepting A ...

, and Google.Lee, Justin. (2013-06-28

The WHIR. Retrieved on 2014-07-10.

Open source components

* Datastore API:

Apache Cassandra Apache Cassandra is a free and open-source software, free and open-source database management system designed to handle large volumes of data across multiple Commodity computing, commodity servers. The system prioritizes availability and scalab ...

and Apache ZooKeeper * Memcache API:

memcached Memcached (pronounced variously /mɛmkæʃˈdiː/ ''mem-cash-dee'' or /ˈmɛmkæʃt/ ''mem-cashed'') is a general-purpose distributed memory-caching system. It is often used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and object ...

* Task Queue API:

RabbitMQ RabbitMQ is an open-source message-broker software (sometimes called message-oriented middleware) that originally implemented the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) and has since been extended with a plug-in architecture to support Str ...

and

Celery Celery (''Apium graveolens'' Dulce Group or ''Apium graveolens'' var. ''dulce'') is a cultivated plant belonging to the species ''Apium graveolens'' in the family Apiaceae that has been used as a vegetable since ancient times. The original wild ...

* XMPP API: ejabberd * Channel API: ejabberd * Blobstore API: Apache Cassandra and Apache ZooKeeper * Images API: Python Imaging Library (PIL) * Cron API: Crontab * HAProxy: HAProxy

Supported platforms

Amazon EC2 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment of ap ...

* CloudStack *

DigitalOcean DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational technology company and cloud service provider. The company is headquartered in New York City, New York, US, with 15 globally distributed data centers. DigitalOcean provides developers, ...

Google Compute Engine Google Compute Engine (GCE) is the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) component of Google Cloud Platform which is built on the global infrastructure that runs Google's search engine, Gmail, YouTube and other services. Google Compute Engine enab ...

Kernel-based Virtual Machine Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is a free and open-source virtualization module in the Linux kernel that allows the Kernel (operating system), kernel to function as a hypervisor. It was merged into the Mainline Linux, mainline Linux kernel i ...

(KVM) *

Microsoft Azure Microsoft Azure, or just Azure ( /ˈæʒər, ˈeɪʒər/ ''AZH-ər, AY-zhər'', UK also /ˈæzjʊər, ˈeɪzjʊər/ ''AZ-ure, AY-zure''), is the cloud computing platform developed by Microsoft. It has management, access and development of ...

OpenStack OpenStack is a free, open standard cloud computing platform. It is mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are made available to users. The software pla ...

RackSpace Rackspace Technology, Inc. is an American cloud computing company based in San Antonio, Texas. It also has offices in Blacksburg, Virginia, Blacksburg, Virginia and Austin, Texas, as well as in Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, India, Dubai, Sw ...

* SoftLayer (IBM) * Xen

Supported languages

* Go *

* Python

External links

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Appscale Cloud platforms Free software for cloud computing Virtualization software for Linux American companies established in 2012