Major updates in Tapp

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.

New Year, new features.

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!

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 Private Beta is out!

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!

Tapp reached alpha version!

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.