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Cloud platform lets devs recreate app stacks as virtual servers


By Jeff Feinman
November 20, 2008 — 
With the rising adoption of cloud computing, a company called CohesiveFT has created software designed to enable developers to take advantage of popular cloud utilities for their application stacks.

The Chicago-based company is the creator of Elastic Server, a platform that allows users to reproduce application stacks, in real time, as virtual servers. Software developers can contain experimental system changes in different Elastic Servers to prevent disruption to their current system. They can then test their software in the cloud without wasting their operational resources.

The application stacks can then be deployed to virtual and cloud-computing environments, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and VMware. Also, a free Community Edition lets users upload their own software packages and applications for use in assembling and managing virtual application stacks.

Patrick Kerpan, CTO and co-founder of CohesiveFT, said Elastic Server allows developers to retain the proper “recipe” for the creation of applications, so it can be reproduced on demand.

“Elastic Servers allow the development team to capture the server definitions, automate the assembly and make them available in ‘read-to-run’ formats for test, staging and data center operations,” Kerpan said. “Software developers are one of the precious resources of the enterprise. As we have moved to open source, loosely coupled architectures like SOA, and [with] dynamic language frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Groovy on Grails, [and] Python on Django, the production deployment complexity has grown.

“It has grown to the point that developers get dragged into the process of production deployment and production problem triage. For developers, that stinks and is a waste of time.”

CohesiveFT was founded in July 2006, with the company’s founders coming from software companies, banks and financial institutions. Craig Heimark, the company’s CEO, worked for O’Connor & Associates, a high-tech derivatives firm eventually acquired by Swiss Bank. Heimark was also a consultant for Reuters and the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE). CohesiveFT’s other founders hail from MetaLogic Software, a provider of shared memory caching for the Java platform, as well as from the CBOE.

The company has additional offices in London and Palo Alto, Calif.

Kerpan was the CTO of Borland Software from 2000 to 2006, joining Borland when it acquired Bedouin, a company he founded to provide team coordination and time-tracking software. Kerpan said Borland gave him a good deal of experience on the ISV side of the software industry.

“In the role I had there, I learned a ton about going to market, distribution and how to talk to customers,” he said. “That’s a hard thing if you’re doing a startup for the first time, or you haven’t worked on the ISV side, so it was a great training ground for [CohesiveFT].”


Related Search Term(s): cloud computing, testing, CohesiveFT


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