QUBELL LAUNCHES FIRST AUTONOMIC APPLICATION MANAGEMENT PLATFORM FOR CLOUD APPLICATIONS

SOURCE: Qubell

SAN FRANCISCO – January 12, 2015 – Qubell announced today the availability of the first autonomic application management platform for cloud applications. Qubell enables applications to become adaptive, self-managed services that configure, heal, optimize and protect themselves in response to changes within dynamic cloud environments. With Qubell, managing applications as an autonomic system dramatically accelerates application release cycles, improves quality, eliminates manual operations and reduces outages and operating costs. The platform is designed for a broad range of web, commerce and big data applications with an emphasis on retail, financial services and high-tech industries.

“In the world of DevOps, automation is key to unlocking a new way of IT service delivery, including concepts such as tool chains and application release automation (ARA). Automation breaks the existing constraints and thus enables new ways of working across the entire IT service life cycle,” according to Gartner. “Higher levels of automation reduce the opportunities to manually introduce  errors and variations and allow continuous process refinement.” ¹

Autonomic Application Management
Unlike conventional DevOps solutions that rely on a human operator to instigate changes and limit automation to fixed blueprints and rigid workflows adjusted by hand with any change in the application or the environment, Qubell enables applications to figure out when and how to perform the routine changes, respond to events and adapt to new circumstances. The end result is a management system that is both proactive and resilient, and gives users “push button” interactions with their applications. Qubell’s autonomic application management platform consists of a:

– Self-Service Portal that enables developers to package applications as self-managed, adaptive entities and operations teams to define policies that govern how applications integrate and respond to changes in their environments. The Self-Service portal allows users to issue high-level commands, such as “launch a new environment” or “upgrade to the latest version,” while providing auditability of changes and visibility over the state of the autonomic system.

– Control Fabric that continuously monitors the stability of the applications, shapes their response to changes, and executes cascading change requests resulting from commands, events, triggers, failures or other changes in the environment.

“Agility is a critical element of our success. Qubell enables us to test and deploy new features continuously, even for complex big data driven applications,” said Kira Makagon, EVP of Innovation at RingCentral, a leading provider of cloud business phone systems.

Use Cases

Qubell’s autonomic application management platform supports the following four use cases:

– Self-service Test Environments: allows developers to launch and dispose of complete application environment with one click. The application figures out how to construct the right sandbox on demand.

– Continuous Delivery:  working together with CI pipeline tools like Jenkins, Qubell ensures that the right build is tested in the right environment as the new release moves down the delivery pipeline.

– Continuous Live Updates: for operations teams rolling out changes, Qubell facilitates safe reconfiguration of affected components as the system adapts to change, or restores them back to the previously stable configuration in case of problems.

– Visibility of Configuration Changes: amidst a constant stream of launches, updates, scaling or failure recovery events, Qubell maintains a log of changes for audit and compliance, and lets administrators know the state of any configuration at any time with powerful tools for change visualization, tracking and audit.

Qubell is based on the concept of autonomic computing originated by IBM, which refers to self-managing computing resources adapting to unpredictable changes, while hiding intrinsic complexity to operators and users. Qubell’s technology applies IBM’s four criteria of autonomic computing to application management in the following ways:

– Self-configuring: applications configure themselves in accordance with high-level policies pre-defined by administrators. When a new application is launched, it bootstraps itself within an existing environment and the system adapts to its presence.

– Self-optimizing: applications detect opportunities to improve themselves and adapt to new changes in their environment. For example, they may choose to parallelize operations, utilize the best resource or upgrade themselves.

– Self-healing: The system constantly monitors the health of each application and if a problem is detected, attempts to restore it back to the stable configuration. In addition, applications themselves are aware of the changes in their environments and can react by reconfiguring or healing themselves.

– Self-protecting: the system ensures that all changes are authorized based on policies, limits and access rights set by the operators. Applications protect themselves from attacks and exploits by working together with Qubell’s fabric to refuse, contain and stop unauthorized change requests. A detailed audit trail further helps to flag, prevent and investigate unauthorized attempts.

“Technology is becoming both too complex to be managed by people and smart enough to manage itself. At Qubell we are applying the principles of autonomic systems to reliably operate business services that have many internal and external dependencies, and any of them may change at any time,” said Victoria Livschitz, CEO of Qubell. “Our technology has proved itself in enterprise environments. We are now making it super-easy for companies of all sizes to get started with a free self-sign up tier, and gradually step into the paid plans as the usage increases.”

Get Started Quickly
Qubell offers a family of flexible service plans ranging from Qubell Express for free, Qubell Business from $799/month and its custom offering Qubell Enterprise.  Qubell Express is a free, comprehensive base product that makes it easy for users to quickly take advantage of the power of autonomic application management with no risk and no lock-in. Users can sign-up online and start using it within minutes by going to Qubell’s Sign-Up.

Qubell’s Component Bazaar offers a number of pre-packaged components and complete vertical solutions for web, commerce and big data applications.  Starter kits for many popular application stacks are available through Qubell’s growing online community on Github.

¹ Gartner, “Apply Gartner Research for a DevOps Perspective When Implementing a Bimodal Strategy,” by George Spafford and Cameron Haight, October 30, 2014.
About Qubell
Qubell provides the first autonomic application management platform for cloud applications. Qubell empowers developers and operations teams to turn their applications into self-managed entities that will adapt, configure, heal and protect themselves in response to changes within dynamic cloud environments. Founded by a team of application automation and cloud computing experts in 2012, Qubell is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. To learn more, visit www.qubell.com and the company’s blog.