Appistry CloudIQ Platform 4.0, an Overview of What’s New

Today, we’ll take a whirlwind tour of the new gems found in Appistry CloudIQ Platform 4.0.

Appistry CloudIQ Platform 4.0 is the fourth generation of our award-winning cloud application platform formerly known as Appistry Enterprise Application Fabric (EAF). Version 4.0 introduces a new product, Appistry CloudIQ Manager, which gives you the power to easily manage applications and services in both public and private clouds. CloudIQ Manager extends the deployment and operational features of the Appistry EAF 3.x product, and allows you to manage your existing, unmodified applications and infrastructure in cloud environments.

If you have been using Appistry EAF to develop extremely scalable, highly reliable applications in Java, .NET, Spring, C/C++, etc. then that functionality is now found in Appistry CloudIQ Engine. CloudIQ Engine licenses also include a license for CloudIQ Manager, which continues to manage your fabric-based applications.

CloudIQ Manager can be licensed separately or together with CloudIQ Engine.

The release notification contains many helpful links.

Let’s jump on in….

• CloudIQ Manager
• User-deployed Services and Applications
  • With Appistry CloudIQ Manager, users can deploy and manage unmodified 3rd party services, service applications, and service configurations in a "fabric-like" manner. For example, one can take unmodified Apache Tomcat or Microsoft IIS services and their associated applications, and deploy them onto a fabric of many workers. CloudIQ Manager delivers to these services and applications the same simplified, single-point-of-control management that was only previously possible with Appistry EAF fabric applications.
• Finer-tuned Management of Fabric (CloudIQ Engine) Applications
  • CloudIQ Manager introduces finer control over fabric applications. Administrators can gracefully stop and start individual fabric applications on demand, and query the runtime state of fabric applications (starting, started, stopping, stopped, etc.). Also, deleting fabric applications is very simple now.
• Move Worker and Merge Worker options

  • New "move worker" and "merge worker" functionality gives administrators a fine degree of control when moving workers between fabrics. "Moving" a worker resets the worker to "factory" defaults prior to moving it to another fabric. "Merging" a worker means the worker is moved to another fabric with all of its configuration files, and user-deployed 3rd party services and applications and fabric applications still in place. The worker and its target fabric will "merge" and the configuration files, 3rd party services and applications and fabric applications with the highest version numbers will be used across the merged fabric.

• RESTful Management API
  • CloudIQ Manager exposes a RESTful Management API on every worker, and any management function can be addressed to any worker in a given fabric. The RESTful Management API provides a superset of fabric_ctl functionality, and unifies all prior data and reports from both Fabric Monitor and fabric_ctl.
• Management Console
  • The CloudIQ management console is a Rich Internet Application (RIA) that allows one to administer and view the status of multiple fabrics at once. The console is served up by any worker running CloudIQ Manager, and can also be run as a desktop-installed Adobe AIR application. The console uses the RESTful Management API to communicate with fabrics. The console replaces the prior Fabric Monitor. Users can define console extensions to integrate custom management screens into the CloudIQ management console. These extensions can be defined at the scopes of fabric-wide and per-worker.
• Extended Capabilities for Deployable Fabric Archives (FAR)
• Fabric archives are deployable packaged defined by administrators and developers. With CloudIQ Manager 4.0, administrators and developers can take FARs well beyond just deploying shared libraries to the fabric. FARs can now define services, service applications, and service configurations, along with custom behavior and management. For example, users can define and deploy services along with the XML tags and scripts that specify how to start, stop, kill, and query the service’s runtime status.
• Users can declare dependencies between services and their service applications and service configurations. CloudIQ Manager tracks the dependencies and makes sure that required services, applications, and configurations stay in synch. 
• Optimized Deployments and Rolling
  • With CloudIQ Manager 4.0, we’ve optimized when services and workers "roll" on deployment of applications and other files. User and group configuration deployments no longer cause a worker to roll. CloudIQ Engine request and process services do not roll when new applications are deployed to them. Only applications dependent on a newly deployed application or fabric archive (FAR) will roll, while non-dependent applications are unaffected.

• CloudIQ Engine

  • Cached Affinity
    • Cached Affinity is a new type of affinity. Cached affinity is useful when the affinity state of a particular worker does not change often and worker-selection speed is essential. In this affinity type, the resource-key and value passed in the request is used as a look-up in the process service’s affinity cache to determine which workers are available to process the request. The process service will choose one of the available workers. In this model, the task services push information about what affinity resources they own out to the process services, eliminating or at least minimizing the need for a transaction-runtime affinity check.
  • Finer-tuned Management of Fabric Applications (see above under CloudIQ Manager)
• 64-bit Support
  • 64-bit implementations are now available for:
    • RedHat Enterprise Linux 4 64-bit
    • CentOS 4 64-bit
    • RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 64-bit
    • CentOS 5 64-bit
  • Support for SuSE 10.3 64-bit
  • Support for Windows 64-bit will be released soon
    • The Windows 32-bit builds will run under Windows 64-bit provided any required 32-bit libraries used by your application are also present (.NET and Java, etc.)
• Public Cloud Support
  • Appistry CloudIQ images will soon be available on:
    • Amazon EC2
    • GoGrid
    • Skytap
• Documentation
  • Appistry’s documentation has been completely refreshed with includes new navigation.

We’ll see you in the forums over at Peer2Peer!