SCIENCE

The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Contrail consortium has announced Contrail PaaS (ConPaaS) release 1.0. ConPaaS simplifies the way applications can be started and managed in the Cloud. Until ConPaaS, considerable system administrator skills were needed to deploy applications in the Cloud. With ConPaaS, deploying applications making full use of the capabilities of the Cloud requires only a few mouse clicks.

ConPaaS provides a collection of scalable, cloud-ready services for hosting various types of applications. The previous release 0.9 already supported PHP, Java, SQL, noSQL and Hadoop services. Release 1.0 completes this with a Task Farming (Bag-of-Task) service and a Selenium service.

What makes ConPaaS 1.0 a first complete release, however, is the inclusion of security at all levels. This makes ConPaaS ready for real live usage. 

Some of the other improvements in release 1.0 are a simplified installation procedure, a GIT-based method for code uploads and the possibility to run in any availability zone of Amazon Web Services. ConPaaS also runs on top of OpenNebula Clouds.

"This is a major step forward in making the Cloud easier to use," says Guillaume Pierre, who is heading the ConPaaS development team. "ConPaaS is developed within the EC-funded Contrail project by an international team of researchers from the Netherlands, Germany and Slovenia. This greatly adds to the quality of ConPaaS, and could not be reached by one single team."