There are way too many PaaS options around, so AppFog has enveloped one of them and will suck up its technology.
It’s acquired Nodester, the open source PaaS for Node.js, which it says grew 40% in the last 30 days.
AppFog is using Nodester’s intellectual property to collaborate with VMware to deliver WebSocket support in Cloud Foundry, VMware’s open source PaaS.
According to Krishnan Subramanian, founder and principal analyst at Rishidot Research, “It is clear that polyglot and infrastructure agnostic PaaS solutions are the future of PaaS. As enterprise acceptance of PaaS continues to ramp up it is likely that we will see a wave of consolidation.”
AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson means to be that consolidator.
There are something like 200 PaaSs in the world all doing things differently and in the fashion of the times not letting developers know where their apps are deployed or take them and run. Single language PaaSs are, as Nodester founder Chris Matthieu discovered, too limiting.
Carlson says standardization is needed before the enterprise finds the PaaS “too ugly.” They need to run across all vendors and public, private and hybrid clouds, all looking the same.
He figures his crusade will take him three-five years. As AppFog strengthens, the weak sisters will wither. Carlson means to be the last man standing with a couple of “ankle-biters” surviving. Evidently his VCs are backing his play.
Returning to the present, AppFog will keep Nodester running as an independent service until WebSocket support is integrated into AppFog later this year and Matthieu decides whether he wants to stay or go. At that point the applications will move into the AppFog infrastructure, giving Nodester users access to all AppFog features including cross-cloud vendor compatibility. They will be able to deploy apps to a wide range of different IaaS providers.
AppFog’s PaaS supports Java, .NET, Node.js, Python, PHP and Ruby solutions. It did Node.js before Nodester, whose widgetry is deeper and broader than what AppFog had. AppFog also inherits a reported significant community, doubling its own.
Node is tied with PHP as the most popular language on AppFog with the most number of applications running. AppFog claims to have deployed 60,000 mobile and web apps to the cloud.