If you want to meet the ConPaaS team, register to the summer school and you are bound to know everything about this nice system! (in the second screen of the registration process, choose the course on “Cloud Technology”).

ConPaaS is a runtime environment for hosting applications in the cloud. It aims at offering the full power of the cloud to application developers while shielding them from the associated complexity of the cloud. ConPaaS is designed to host both high-performance scientific applications and online Web applications. It automates the entire life-cycle of an application, including collaborative development, deployment, performance monitoring, and automatic scaling. Finally, it runs on a variety of public and private clouds, and is easily extensible. This allows developers to focus their attention on application-specific concerns rather than on cloud-specific details.

ConPaaS-0.9.0 contains five services specialized for different tasks:

• PHP Web hosting service
• Java Web hosting service
• MySQL database service
• Scalarix NoSQL key-value store
• MapReduce service

Each service is self-contained and fully elastic. This means that increasing or decreasing the processing capacity of ConPaaS services is entirely automated. The application owner only has to click one button in the Web interface to trigger such reconfigurations. Services can be easily composed. For example, the user guide contains a short tutorial explaining how to install WordPress on ConPaaS using the PHP and MySQL services.

ConPaaS-0.9.0 runs on Amazon’s EC2 as well as OpenNebula. Besides the regular software release, ConPaaS is also available in two different forms which make testing easy:

• ConPaaS Online is a public installation of ConPaaS. It offers a free trial feature so anyone can create an account and start using the system freely.
• We also provide ready-made images for Amazon EC2. Using these images, starting your own ConPaaS system requires only a few minutes.

Please note that ConPaaS-0.9.0 has one important caveat: the system is not fully secured yet so advanced attackers would be able to carry out successful attacks. This means that the system is suitable for private cloud environments where users are trusted, or for demonstration purposes in public clouds. Implementing full security obviously features at the very top of our current to-do list.

For any information, question or feedback about ConPaaS, please contact us at info@conpaas.eu.

If you like ConPaaS and would like to keep on using it, get in touch with us and we can extend your credits. Alternatively, you may want to download ConPaaS and install it yourself.

• Scalarix: a scalable transactional key-value store (i.e., a NoSQL database)
• MapReduce: a high-performance framework for parallel computing
• Java: Web servers hosting static content and Java servlets
• PHP: Web servers hosting static content and PHP documents

Two more services are almost ready and will be integrated soon:

• MySQL: a ConPaaS service built around the famous relational database
• BagsOfTasks: a high-performance execution framework for scientific computing

These new services will be made available for download and in the public testbed as soon as possible. In the mean time, you may want to take a look at the following screenshots.

Are you interested in ConPaaS? If so, then why not give it a try?