What can you do with AppLogic?

Depending on your needs, you can use AppLogic in several different ways. This section describes some of the basic scenarios of how our customers use AppLogic. As the time goes, we will be adding more data to it.

Deliver prepackaged online applications on demand

You can set up an AppLogic grid to run many instances of one or more prepackaged web applications. This is useful if you are a hosting provider interested in selling access to high-value on demand applications such as CRM, E-mail, VoIP PBX and many others. AppLogic makes it easy to create a copy of the desired application for each customer, configure it with an IP address and hardware resources, and have it running within minutes.

The whole process can be automated and driven by a script runninng as part of the ordering page on your website. Individual applications can start from a fraction of a server, and scale out if and when the customer is ready to put more load on them and pay for it.

Deploy applications on standard infrastructure

If you are a software developer and don't enjoy configuring servers and infrastructure, AppLogic makes it extremely easy to deploy scalable web applications without the help of IT personnel. Assuming your application code handles concurrency correctly (e.g., uses database transactions where necessary), deploying a 2-tier or 3-tier application on AppLogic is as easy as picking the right infrastructure assembly from the catalog, copying your HTML files, scripts code and database onto the right logical volumes and starting the finished application.

The catalog assemblies are built by IT experts and ready for production deployment, and they are carefully instrumented so that you can use the AppLogic monitoring system as a visual debugging tool that shows you what's happening in the entire application.

By writing a script or two, you can easily integrate deployment with your build process, so that changes you make to the code or the user interface are deployed automatically on the grid every time you rebuild the code.

Scale an online service without the complexity of multitenant systems

Many SaaS applications are similar to CRM and e-mail systems in that while they do share significant amount of state among users who belong to the same organization or customer, sharing between different customers is not required, and is often explicitly discouraged. If your application falls into this category, AppLogic can make it extremely easy to scale your online service without spending money on complex IT infrastructure and people to manage it. Simply deploy your application on a standard 2-tier or 3-tier infrastructure assembly that comes with AppLogic (see below how you can build custom infrastructure when needed), and automate the system to create an instance of the application for each new customer you sign.

Not only is this a great way to scale your online service (and, therefore, your business!), but the resulting system is much more resilient than a large, complex multi-tenant application built the old-fashioned way: Because in AppLogic each application instance carries it's own infrastructure, including database servers, application servers, etc., the failure of a database server can no longer affect more than a single customer. Say goodbye to expensive Oracle licenses.

Develop new web applications

If you are a software developer who is starting on a new application project, AppLogic can save you a lot of time and aggravation by allowing you to build and test your application with the exact middleware and system configuration on which it will run.

To do this, simply copy and start one of the "developer's workbench" applications that come with AppLogic; in minutes, you will have a private N-tier application setup fully integrated with your development environment and tools. Run it in "sandbox" mode to fit even the largest application on a single server, or use a larger grid to test your code under real-world loads at any time.

Build custom N-tier application infrastructure

For IT professionals whose job requires designing, building and replicating complex distributed infrastructures, AppLogic is the ultimate power trip. Using the AppLogic visual infrastructure editor and the catalog of virtual appliances, you assemble, configure and troubleshoot your system visually, and get it done in hours rather than weeks.

Building your own appliances takes about as much time as setting up a server with the same functionality, and once you built it, you can import it into the catalog and use it over and over again. What's more, AppLogic makes it easy to pre-assemble frequently used subsystems, such as clustered databases, web tiers, application server clusters, and many others, and reuse these assemblies in many applications, or in several places within the same application.

Debugging your system is easy - at any point, you can run the application you are building, SSH into any of the appliances to see what's happening inside them or to fix a problem. The AppLogic monitoring system makes it easy to visualize what's happening in the application under load, so troubleshooting and performance tuning are easier than ever before, and saving a "known good" state of the application to which you can rollback if you do something wrong requires simply an application snapshot.

When you are done, you can literally check your application into a version control system such as CVS or Subversion, and have complete visibility into all changes made to its infrastructure, configuration or code from this point forward, plus the ability to roll them back and to restore prior versions of the application.

When you build your infrastructure as an AppLogic application, it becomes extremely easy to replicate. Simply copy the application to run another instance of your system on the same grid, or export it into a portable archive that you can import and run on any other AppLogic grid, including ones that are built from different servers and have a different number of servers, in minutes.

-- VladM - 22 May 2006