Apcera Releases Production-Grade Community Edition Designed to Speed Deployment of Microservices and Container-Based Architectures

SAN FRANCISCO, CA–(Marketwired – Apr 14, 2016) – Apcera, the leader in trust-first computing, today released a free community version of its cloud platform. Apcera Platform Community Edition (CE) is the first platform that lets developers and IT teams build a working compute cluster in as little as 15 minutes on a laptop, or in a small cloud computing environment. Unlike other community editions, Apcera Platform CE provides a production-ready environment for deploying small-scale applications, microservices and even large scale processing engines for jobs that are not time sensitive.

“Apcera CE takes the hard work out of setting up compute clusters,” said David Williams, co-founder and principal of cloud native platform specialists Williams Garcia. “Not only is Apcera CE simple to use, but it’s also as fast and easy to build on AWS as it is locally on a developer’s machine. Workload and system mobility means that we can develop locally in CE then easily deploy to staging or production in Apcera Enterprise Edition on a public or private cloud. The ability to provision as many runtime nodes as we need to support our application workloads lets us run larger, more complex jobs, which is unheard of for a community edition.”

Apcera CE provides developers, DevOps teams and ITOps departments the following capabilities:

• One-click Docker deploys – Developers can click to deploy standard Docker images of widely used software packages, which are brought up with networking and security settings already pre-configured.
• Fast, flexible development – Teams can effectively work from anywhere while creating a personal compute cluster to test and develop production-ready apps on their own terms, on a laptop or in a public or private cloud.
• Comprehensive security and governance – Users have full access to the Apcera Policy Engine and all of the platform’s security and governance capabilities to experiment with granular policy setups, such as resource control, network and service access, software versioning and control over workload placement and scheduling.
• Native container support – Apcera CE was designed from inception as a trusted and secure container management platform for containers, including Docker images.
• Simplified staging, service discovery and cloud API access – CE automatically detects frameworks for simplified environment staging. It also automates the discovery of databases and external cloud APIs.
• Default persistent storage – Apcera’s Community Edition includes NFS-based, infrastructure independent storage by default, not just external connectivity. Persistent storage for jobs, including Docker jobs, enables users to move workloads within their own cluster or to other compute infrastructures and cloud platforms.
• Default support for languages, databases, and services – CE supports major programming languages (Java, Node.js, Ruby and Python), the most popular web databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL and MongoDB), external services (S3), configuration tools (Chef, Puppet) and common compute platforms (AWS, Azure, OpenStack, VMware and VirtualBox).

In contrast to other community edition platforms, which can take hours or even days to set up, Apcera CE users deploy in as little as 15 minutes (depending on network speeds).

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“What I like the most about Apcera so far is how simple and smooth the installation was,” said Eric Harper, lead software architect at ABB, a global leader in Power and Automation technologies. “To evaluate other cloud platforms requires fairly large deployment footprints and may take months to set up. Apcera CE took just one afternoon and can run on 8 GB of RAM.”

Developers can immediately and securely set up databases and services within their cluster, connect to external services and build real applications without assistance from IT Operations or DevOps teams. In turn, DevOps and IT teams that want to give their developers a flexible environment still enjoy built-in audit trails, health monitoring and other capabilities that are traditionally delivered as separate services or only available in enterprise editions of software.

“With Apcera CE, we are giving developers and IT teams the fastest and easiest way to stand up a cluster,” said Josh Ellithorpe, software architect, Apcera. “It directly addresses the problems of today’s cobbled-together, patchwork cloud by providing simple yet complete application and infrastructure lifecycle management designed for containers and the cloud.”

In parallel with Apcera CE, Apcera has also released Libretto, a set of open source libraries for provisioning workloads on different cloud and virtualization providers. Libretto powers Apcera’s own multi-cloud provisioning but can also be used as standalone software. This is the latest open source contribution by Apcera, which also supports the open source NATS messaging system and the Kurma container management platform.

For more information or to download Apcera Community Edition visit: www.apcera.com/community-edition

About Apcera
The Apcera trusted cloud platform is a highly secure, policy-driven hybrid-cloud platform for cloud-native applications, containers, microservices and legacy applications. Apcera enables developers and DevOps teams to use any modern tool or software they want while giving IT and Operations teams the assurance that their infrastructure is safe and secure.

Apcera enables key enterprise use cases including hybrid cloud workload and system mobility, modern application architecture development, legacy application modernization and policy-driven workload governance. With Apcera, companies can innovate at speed with full confidence and trust. Global 2000 companies use Apcera to securely deploy, orchestrate and govern diverse workloads across multiple cloud and infrastructure providers, resulting in lower cost, faster time to market, and mitigated risk.

Apcera is headquartered in San Francisco. For more information, visit http://www.apcera.com, read the company’s blog or follow on Twitter:@apcera.