SaaS application hosting

SaaS application hosting

Customer Problem

SaaS companies delivering scale-out, resilient cloud-ready applications, need extremely scalable yet cost effective infrastructure for deploying their services as the cost of public cloud becomes prohibitive as their demand for resource consumption grows. SaaS companies need an elastic and responsive cloud infrastructure – one that behaves like a public cloud but is in their own datacenter using their own dedicated resources that only need to be paid for once. However, for variable, seasonal, or unexpected needs, SaaS companies need to be able to leverage public clouds immediately and without friction, so that the private infrastructure does not need to be wastefully scaled to maximum service needs with significant parts of the infrastructure sitting idle when not required.

Benefits

• Deploy and update SaaS applications instantly without the need for high friction operations process
• Grow and shrink SaaS applications programmatically based on demand on the application
• Allow faster iteration so your organization can adapt to business changes and customer demands

Key Functionality

• Extreme scalability – the infrastructure will not be a bottleneck for business growth
• Zero-touch node installation to grow the cloud as quickly as you can acquire business and to streamline maintenance
• Self-healing distributed control plane ensures that your service will always be up and available to your customers
• Multi-site management allows a geographically distributed cloud
• Programmatic control for launching instances via launch plans
• Data management with Nimbula Disk Service
• Federation to public clouds for variable compute needs

Solution Details

Nimbula Director delivers an elastic private cloud with programmatic controls. SaaS applications and the tools that manage them can allocate and release resources on demand. This allows for the elastic growth and contraction of an application over time enabling properly written applications to
scale to enormous capacity when load grow and to give way to other uses when load shrinks. This elastic control can be completely automated via programmatic cloud interfaces with no need for IT intervention.

Nimbula’s SaaS hosting can be augmented by partnerships and integrations with configuration tools such a Chef and Puppet, continuous integration products such as Electric Cloud, scaling software such as Scalr and enStratus, and load balancers such as Zeus.

Capital costs are low because the cloud is based on open components, all the self-service functionality is baked into a single cost-effective SKU, and because public clouds are utilized where appropriate. Because the Nimbula private cloud manages its own scalability and health, operations costs are also very low. With Nimbula Director, you get a solution that is more targeted for your newer applications at a cost much lower than what is used to manage legacy applications.

Where capacity demands cannot be met in the private datacenter, use of public cloud is enabled. Using the same programmatic interfaces for deployment and management of the SaaS application internally, the application can be made to expand into a public cloud such as Amazon’s EC2.