Tapp

Tapp the catalyst of a best-of-breed cloud service alliance

2013-03-13T00:00:00+01:00

Here we are, back again into our blog. I apologize to our loyal following base (aka, our families and closest friends, if at all) as I do not sit down to write as often as I probably should. Truth is that we hardly sit down at Tapp.in these days, so to speak. Busy, busy and a hyper-productive period in the company!

A tribute to the core Development team for I have never seen such productivity and delivery in a group of engineers and this is surely not my first rodeo!! Please meet Ninjas Christian (1), Pablo (2), Alberto (3) & Master Ninja Javi (5) … my hat off to them! All smiley faces, you can probably tell we have fun at Tapp. I have found the Holy Grail this time around and picked a partner and a team that hands-down are way smarter than me.

On to the post, I wanted to welcome new members into our dear Tapp family of friends and partners (SumoLogic and Boundary) and explain how these awesome stacks bring the Tapp experience a step forward and deliver our customers with real tangible value. Coincidentally and unintentionally, both announcements were made on the same day last week from the West Coast, US … here’s SumoLogic’s and here Boundary’s.

So what’s the big news? Seems like “yet another press release of vapor-ware by another start-up with lack of real news”. Well, no.

First, announcements came out only when both platforms were already fully integrated in Tapp and readily available. We at Tapp put our actions were our mouth is and do not communicate intentions but realities, ever! More importantly, it is another stepping stone towards our goal of integrating best-of-breed solutions into Tapp and bring a one-stop all-inclusive user experience in multi-cloud management. Like The Ring in the Cloud, One Ring to bring them all …

We do our share of due diligence and actively research the market; listen to the needs of customers and partners and invest many hours of lab work trying out different solutions before we zero-in on a potential complementary partner and then, we pursue the partnership and integration like no one’s business. That is why it is very material news for us when we close-in a new partner with Tapp: we are honored to associate with the leading best-of-breed solutions and software stacks out there.

Sumologic is an impressive solution delivering machine-data insights (ie, log management and analytics) and a natural choice over on-premise legacy software. On the other hand, Boundary delivers real-time information about application traffic that allows the resolution of many issues such as misconfigured networks and DNS tables, chatty nodes, security attacks, … The folks at Boundary interviewed us for their blog.

What’s in it for our customers? It goes beyond the convenience to manage multi-cloud set-ups on one single portal. That only would be well worth a shot at integration. But also Tapp customers will benefit from augmented free service plans or extended try-out periods, thus pushing the value of the partnerships down to the Tapp user, right at their fingertips. No Marketing noise, but real value.

The icing on the cake is though what we plan to do in Tapp with all the data gathered by our integrated partners like New Relic, Sumologic or Boundary. A true innovation in multi-cloud management and at the very essence of cloud computing: unprecedented elastic computing resource allocation. Tapp shall use proactive network monitoring, application performance data and machine-data to deploy autoscaling capabilities raising the bar for automated cloud infrastructure management.

That is already work in progress by our engineers at Tapp.in but …. Ooops, didn’t I just say that we only announce what we already have? This business-driven autoscaling will be covered in another forthcoming post. Stay tuned!

Usability over Functionality

2012-11-15T00:00:00+01:00

My engineering team keeps on pushing me to come out regularly. I do not know how they do it, but they do! As I sit down to write this post, I recall back in the 90’s when I conducted hi-fi Usability tests and –back then- championed what was called HCI (Human Computer Interaction). It was back in the day when I was a consultant in Accenture’s Change Management practice and fat fees were billed by “us”, Change Management folks, to bridge incapacitated ENG teams and code-writers to bring software to the users.

Oh man, how the world has changed!

I remember clearly, as if it was today, cameras overseeing corporate users struggle to push a “Cancel” button in a custom-built Retail bank accounting system. Canceling an account was an inbred sin for a bank teller. A “Cancel” was a no-no, we changed to an “Abandon” literal on push-buttons, and we (Change Management folks) thought we delivered real value. And those engineers were a bunch of hicks who didn’t know about human psyche but code-dogs or lab rats.

Oh man, how the world has changed!

My team of engineers, not only write flawless code, so I think, but do so in a way that blows me away. Efficiency, scalability, documentation and built-in tests are at the forefront of their daily work, but they only show-it-off when they are confident of how easy it is to operate and use. No regard to full functionality, but full usability. A usability flaw, renders their code (and their hard work) useless at the outset. Not the result of a QA process but rather in their DNA of code writing.

So here it is …. We have released just today a UI to deploy software stacks on multi-cloud setups that even my smaller kid of Eric with the Ipad could understand. In fact he did understand sooner that I got the picture!

Now you can deploy a three-tier architecture, on any large IaaS provider, independent of any vendor-maintained image, picking and choosing from icons and hovering your mouse (or your finger), illuminating as you go. You got a question? Click on the support tab and the Tapp support engineer will see your screen in a non-intrusive before-your-firewall HTML session where he can talk you through it via Skype.

Talk about bringing the cloud to the end-user? It is no longer a data-storage-collaborative-drag&drop software for the John Doe (or Joe Bloggs in Ireland) … but at the infrastructure level too.

Soon my 8-year old will provision a Virtual Machine, deploy a software stack, monitor its performance or even broker across infrastructure vendors, as easy as he asks for a milk-shake at Braum’s. And be making money Day 1 from the gaming site he just thought of and released to hit millions of users ….

Get the picture? Go Tapp.in!

... and the Product Tapp.in keeps on growing!

2012-10-24T00:00:00+02:00

Busy days these days, lots to tell our friends and followers of Tapp.in!

First and foremost: the Product. You’ll come to realize, as I sit down regularly to update you all on our progress, that Product comes first in our Company. No wonder … you know how the tale goes “every engineer pops up the enterprise value 1M, take off 300K for every suit”. I happen to be the suit around here but I am completely product-obsessed. So, well … take off just 200K!

We have decided to build an awesome abstraction layer in multi-cloud setups where best of breed software will be offered to our customers. By means of building it ourselves or integrating the best stacks out there. We dedicate a fair amount of time to scout the best solutions in the market and invest heavily in encapsulating those into Tapp.in to become a truly one-stop cloud broker. One where low-key tech inexperienced SMB or highly sophisticated tech-savvy companies can both find value in our offering.

So we had built monitoring algorithms to offer advice to our customers on brokering in-between IaaS offerings. But we are not a cloud monitoring Company, we never were, so we have fully integrated Newrelic to embed their data into our monitoring panel and offer application performance metrics to our developer community. Very soon every customer of Tapp.in will leverage Newrelic’s APM incredible insight …. A first token of many other capabilities to be released in Tapp.in with this data. If you have not already, check out this APM leading soft.

On to our end user-obsession: our engineers have devised a wizard that allows provisioning, start-up and deploying cloud applications in three clicks. A major undertaking that will bring the cloud closer to everyone without diminishing the wide options in our platform for our beloved community of geeks like us.

Our Backup and DS also needed an infusion of prime innovation. We have executed a strategic partnership with our friends at Guardtime to bring Disaster Recovery as a Service (DSaaS) to our Tapp.in users. An incredibly innovative Estonian startup that will define the path in security and integrity in Backup/DSaaS in years to come.

Many more software stacks are under evaluation, like analytics and optimization of cloud setups, networking analysis and even forward derivatives on the purchase of cloud capacity. All that for next posts.

But … Our Windows customers are always on our mind though (only wait and see the impact of Windows 8 in the marketplace). I already commented in a previous post that we could provision Windows OS in the public cloud. Now, we will bring many templates and recipes to deploy software stacks in Windows VMs with Tapp’s easy-to-use way.

Product highlighted, now on to our Market stride.

We are very happy to announce that the Tapp.in platform has been deployed for Acens customers, branded Cloud Express. The GigaOM event was also insightful and enriching … and fun. Better sign off and report on another post as my oldest son Nicolas is coming back from his birthday party!

GigaOM Structure - Europe 2012 LaunchPad

2012-09-24T00:00:00+02:00

I promised it wouldn’t be long before you would hear back from us. So here we are: Just today GigaOM announced the finalists in GigaOM’s Structure:Europe 2012 LaunchPad, a high-profile competition that recognizes Europe’s most-promising startups in cloud computing … and YES Tapp.in has been selected!

Javi (our CTO/founder and our “Master Ninja”) and I will be in Amsterdam on 16-17 October 2012 just in case you stop by. For more details on this event you can read in our press release click here.

Let’s keep it on!

The eclosion of an IaaS CSB "cool vendor" - A Tapp update

2012-09-21T00:00:00+02:00

It’s been quite a long time since we have updated our followers in Tapp about our progress. We have not been castaways in a tiny Pacific island of turquoise shores, nor have we been vacationing in the Bahamas pinha-colada at hand in an off-site retreat; we wish we had but we have not. It has been a frenzied and most productive last few months.

As a starter, this is my first post of many to come and this is the first time I come out publicly in our blog. An introduction is (probably) past due, so here’s the story: Following an angel investment in Tapp and many months of monitoring its evolution, I was invited to lead this awesome team of sharp engineers as the Company’s CEO. I gladly obliged and jumped on board with no hesitation, it is about time to bring this otherwise hidden and already polished gem on to the spotlight.

Once introductions are duly made, on to the important and exciting stuff: the Product - the Market is already an all recurrent ‘yadda yadda’ by the analysts of how fast and how important public IaaS providers and Services brokers will grow. Just today Gartner released a 45.4% expected growth for public IaaS in 2012. It amazes me the exactitude, all the way to predicting to 0.4 bps! … We shall see.

On the Product-end we continued to learn from our oversubscribed pool of 200 companies who became Tapp’s Beta testers: There’s nothing better than gathering feedback from your early-on customers, the raison d’être of every line of code we write at Tapp. But we wanted to feel the heat ourselves too so we became Beta testers of Telefonica Digital’s June launch of InstantServers, the market brand of Joyent’s flamboyant virtualization technology deployed by Telefónica (by the way, kudos to Telefónica for closing on last December investment in Joyent). Here’s our Javi’s (our CTO & founder) feedback http://youtu.be/uwl0KJeilnc

So we decided to bring Joyent to the Pleiades of IaaS stars with which Tapp is already fully compatible: Done!

Now, that opened the door to Operating Systems, we needed to close the virtuous circle and so we did: we worked first to deploy Windows machines and associated software stacks with Tapp: Done! SmartOS was next: Done! Tapp is now able and ready to commission, boot and install soft in all three OS in the largest public IaaS vendors.

Not enough, we decided our framework and platform could also be of use to the large Operators that in the end reach the end-customer easier, faster, smoother. Like judokas we thought of leveraging other’s momentum and clout to bring momentum on to Tapp. So Pickdew was born ….

Our technology might be reaching you one day (hopefully, very shortly) while you are unaware that the Tapp folks are behind what you are actually using … and loving. If the ease-of-use of your IaaS provider suddenly changes and you feel a refreshing cool in your IT Ops day-to-day, we will look the other way.

Product, product, product! …. There is more we can say and some other stuff we can not. But promised we shall, very soon. So, what we can say is that we forged a partnership with Newrelic that opens up a world of opportunities and better service to our Tapp customers. Our Engineering team is heads-down right now on integrating Newrelic’s monitoring capabilities into Tapp and their truly outstanding app performance offering. We were never an IaaS monitoring software, nor we intended to be. This partnership will bring a wealth of customer-value and will set us out of the pack.

You will be hearing from us a lot more, in this blog and elsewhere. If you don’t, just reach out …. we are certainly not in the Bahamas!

Besol named 'Cool Vendor' in Cloud Services Brokerage by Gartner

2012-06-11T00:00:00+02:00

Today in Besol we are happy to announce that the world’s leading IT analyst firm, Gartner Inc., has selected our company as a Cool Vendor in Gartner’s “Cool Vendors in Cloud Services Brokerage Enablers, 2012” report published on 12 April 2012 by Tiffani Bova, Daryl C. Plummer, et al.

To learn more about this please read the Gartner Report or Official Press Release.

Meet Javier Perez Griffo CTO/Founder of Tapp

2012-05-02T00:00:00+02:00

About 4 months ago, our CTO/Founder Javier Perez-Griffo was interviewed by Silicon Valley Startup Accelerator StepOne, and talked about the Tapp project and how after visiting Silicon Valley we decided to open an office there ASAP. Seeing this video we can proudly say we have advanced quite a lot during this time and can’t wait to show off what is to come in the following weeks.

Tapp partners up with Rackspace

2012-04-27T00:00:00+02:00

Tapp gets a big boost this week from Rackspace, one of the industry’s leading cloud service providers and an important part of the Tapp partner ecosystem, and we couldn’t be prouder! Rackspace has chosen Tapp as a featured partner on its Cloud Tools site (a showcase for the many diverse uses of the Rackspace Cloud) and highlighted us as their Spotlight Tool for the week.

Not only that, as many as you know, the OpenStack project is an open source initiative for the creation of private cloud infrastructures backed by many renowned cloud players, including Rackspace. Since this a hot topic for them, they have graciously invited us to write a post about this initiative on their blog, published under the name “Hybrid Cloud Infrastructures: Overcoming Management Hurdles”

Major updates in Tapp

2012-04-16T00:00:00+02:00

We know that it’s been a while since we last wrote anything about Tapp in our webpage. Those of you who usually connect to Tapp have probably noticed a significant improvement in performance. The reason is that we have updated both our nonsql setup and parts of the Ruby on Rails framework we have been using. On the other side, we have also been working hard in the integration of private cloud initiatives like VMware vCloud, Openstack and Cloudstack. All these plus a little bit of magic in the UI part will be at your disposal after our next release next Friday.

Tapp partners up with Cloudsigma

2012-03-20T00:00:00+01:00

In our never ending task of improving the multicloud ecosystem, we have signed a partnership agreement with Cloudsigma, which will help us improve the level of service to those of our users using their IaaS services. This is the first of what we hope will be soon a varied set of partnership agreements, so pay attention. To read the press release, please visit http://cloudsigma.com/en/about-us/press-releases/212

Tapp helps you keep high service availability on the cloud

2012-02-17T00:00:00+01:00

We are proud to announce that starting tomorrow 18th February there will be a new functionality available at Tapp: Disaster Recovery. We have prepared the screencast below to show you what it is all about and how it works, but to sum up, this functionality allows for automatic backup and few-click service restoration of your cloud servers on another provider. For the moment the service will be compatible with Dropbox and Amazon S3 but next week we will be releasing other backup end mechanisms.

Happy recovery!

Tapp can now deploy an online store for you!

2012-02-02T00:00:00+01:00

This week we are releasing a recipe to deploy a complete Magento stack easily with Tapp. For those few of you who have not heard about Magento, it is an open-source e-commerce platform, a perfect candidate to deploy an online store. The recently released recipe allows you to ease and automate its installation. With Tapp, deploying Magento on the cloud is now as simple as our example featuring a Wordpress deployment!

Besides, as you may have noticed, we have deployed Disqus as commenting system for our news section. We would like you to burn it down suggesting software you would like us to convert into new recipes at Tapp.

Tapp can now deploy an online store for you!

2012-02-02T00:00:00+01:00

New Year, new features.

2012-01-04T00:00:00+01:00

For the last weeks we have been quiet about our work on Tapp, but that does not mean we have not been working hard to improve our platform.

For starters we have been including support for not one, but two new IaaS providers! We released this feature into production in Tapp just this week, so you can already start deploying servers using CloudSigma and IBM Smartcloud offerings. We are also working to integrate other provider APIs, such as OpenStack.

Besides, if you have your AWS credentials registered at Tapp, you can now deploy servers at their new zone in Oregon (US West).

We have also increased our supported Linux distribution set with a new one: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. It is only available for servers deployed on IBM Smartcloud at the moment, but support for it over other IaaS providers is coming. And again we managed to further improve the servers bootstrap procedure over all supported Linux distributions and providers.

Plus we have made our DNS service sort of intelligent, as it now easily allows for DNS load balancing. In order to make use of this new feature you only need to provide a set of servers each with a DNS record with the same name. When our DNS service is queried about this name, it will then round-robin over the set of active servers to build the response.

Finally, there is our soon-to-be Disaster Recovery feature. We are still testing it, but we find it so awesome that we could not keep quiet about it anymore. When it is released, it will allow for seamless backup and recovery of servers deployed specifically with it at Tapp.

We hope you enjoy all this hard work, meanwhile we’ll keep on working on improving Tapp!

Happy New Year 2012 from the Tapp staff!

Improvements and new features on Tapp!

2011-11-17T00:00:00+01:00

During these past two weeks we have invested resources on accelerating the server bootstrap process, which is responsible for the configuration of servers deployed with Tapp. We are proud to announce we have obtained a significative performance increase that amounts up to a 7x factor and has already been made available to our users.

We have also been working on another two features that will be released before next week:

Until now all servers launched with Tapp had to be deployed with Ubuntu as Linux distribution, but from next week on our users will be able to choose CentOS instead. Specifically, we are putting the icing on CentOS 5 support for GoGrid, Linode and Rackspace servers. We have not found a suitable image for CentOS 5 on AWS, so support for CentOS on this provider will have to wait till we build and publish such image though. On the plus side, support for similar distributions such as Red Hat will require much less effort to provide and will probably come soon.
Next week our users will also be able to deploy servers on Arsys’ IaaS Cloud Builder. This provider does not currently provide an Ubuntu 10.04 LTS image, so for the moment the only available distribution at Tapp to deploy on Arsys will be CentOS 5.

Enjoy it!

Tapp visits STC with ICEX and StepOne

2011-10-17T00:00:00+02:00

Tapp has participated in an expedition to the Spain Tech Center (STC) in U.S. organized by ICEX and StepOne. Tapp’s representation met with several startups in both Rocketspace and Techstars STC locations, in Silicon Valley-San Francisco and Seattle respectively. Our platform was shown to these startups in an effort to sense how best Tapp can respond to the IT sector needs in the U.S. market, and we are proud to say that it got a very favorable reception.

Tapp in Gartner's "The Role of CSB in the Cloud Services Value Chain" report

2011-10-04T00:00:00+02:00

Daryl Plummer’s “The Role of Cloud Service Brokerage in the Cloud Services Value Chain” report was released on 4th October by Gartner Group and is available (pre-paid only) at Gartner Group website (http://my.gartner.com/portal/server.pt?gr=dd&ref=shareSummary&resId=1814314). As the Gartner Group’s specialist anticipated in his blog article at the end of August, Besol is mentioned, specifically as a provider for brokerage and management at the IaaS level in reference to our platform Tapp.

Free server hours with AWS and GoGrid

2011-10-03T00:00:00+02:00

Some cloud providers like Amazon Web Services or GoGrid offer free server hours for new developers to try their services. In order to profit from these offerings you only have to register yourself at the cloud provider and then register your account at that cloud provider on the Tapp Settings/Credentials section. For more information on the free offerings we refer you to the cloud providers: GoGrid (http://www.gogrid.com), AWS (http://aws.amazon.com/free/). For a detailed tutorial on using AWS free server offering through Tapp, please consult the following post on our forum (only accessible to logged-in Tapp beta users).

How to use Tapp to deploy BigBlueButton multiconference system

2011-09-30T00:00:00+02:00

As we promised last week, our screencast on how to deploy a videoconference service on the cloud is here. This screencast introduces firewall configuration through Tapp, since BigBlueButton, the chosen videoconference software, needs some ports open besides those for SSH, HTTP and HTTPS (which Tapp opens by default). As you can see Tapp can be very useful for the deployment of advanced and complex server configurations.

For the deployment of the service we have developed a Chef cookbook. We believe in contributing to the open-source community so we have open-sourced our bigbluebutton cookbook and you can find it here.

How to use Tapp to deploy Wordpress Blog in the cloud

2011-09-22T00:00:00+02:00

We were thinking this week that many people are interested in deploying a blog server on the cloud and are prevented from doing so by the technical knowledge it requires. Tapp eliminates this barrier and we have released this screencast to show you how simple the deployment of wordpress on any of our supported cloud providers can be with Tapp. So please, watch it and if interested in playing with Tapp a bit, sign up into our beta program.

For the next week we are thinking of releasing a more enterprise-oriented screencast featuring a cloud videoconference service deployment.

Tapp Private Beta is out!

2011-09-13T00:00:00+02:00

Today is a special day for us, the Besol staff, as we are happy to finally release the private beta of our platform Tapp.

In a few words, Tapp is a web application that allows you to manage your servers on the cloud with ease and flexibility. With Tapp you can configure a template with your server’s applications, deploy it on servers running on different cloud providers (Amazon Web Services, GoGrid, Rackspace and Linode for now) and monitor their use of resources. Tapp allows you to do all this in just a few minutes and mouse clicks, using a highly usable and dynamic web interface.

We are giving away free beta invitations, for users interested in trying our platform. Some of our supported cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services have free server offerings, with which you could try Tapp. You can request your invitation for a beta free account at Tapp signing up here!

Tapp is the result of nearly two years of hard work here at Besol headquarters in Seville. We have tried to do something different and technically innovative, thinking about how to best meet our future user’s needs, and we are quite satisfied with what we have done. We hope you enjoy it!

Besol, a IaaS cloud brokerage reference to Gartner Group

2011-08-31T00:00:00+02:00

Gartner Group specialist Daryl Plummer wrote an article on his blog about his upcoming “Who’s who in cloud Services Brokerage” report. In the article, he analyzes the situation of cloud service brokerage in general and in the context of cloud IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) services in particular, mentioning Besol as a technology reference.

Tapp reached alpha version!

2011-03-14T00:00:00+01:00

After more than one year of work Tapp reached alpha version stability. Received public funding allowed us to ampliate our staff with user and frontend specialists. The result is that this private release of Tapp features an updated user interface allowing Dns management, template configuration using Chef services and scripts, as well as server deployment on Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and Linode. On a more technical note, this release incorporates the use of MongoDB as database backend and of WebSockets and jQuery for the user interface. Future beta version release is planned to feature firewall profile configuration and GoGrid support, besides a greater grade of stability.

Besol receives a Spanish Grant for R&D

2010-12-29T00:00:00+01:00

The Center for the Development of Industrial Technology (CDTI) approved a Neotec I grant to Besol Solutions last November. This grant will be used for the development of a innovative initiative for the cloud sector. The platform created will be used to manage MultiCloud infrastructure, this means, a web platform which will allow to control infrastructure of resources from different cloud providers. The Andalusian company has started to employ staff so that they may meet the time requirements of a public Beta version of the platform by the end of the third trimester of 2011.