CA AppLogic - Product Information
Is Your Organization Ready for Turnkey Cloud Computing?
Is your organization looking for an easier option for delivery of scalable and highly secure cloud based solutions for your end users or customers? Or how about enabling self service delivery of complex applications in a repeatable, manageable, and billable fashion? CA AppLogic can help you design, test, and deploy complex cloud solutions for your end users or for external customers in less time than build from scratch cloud solutions.
The CA AppLogic platform is a turnkey cloud computing platform for composing, running and scaling distributed applications. It uses advanced virtualization technologies allowing you to deploy solutions based on your existing operating systems, middleware and web applications. In fact, there are billions of lines of tried and true infrastructure software, middleware and application code that can be used unaltered with CA AppLogic.
With CA AppLogic as your cloud platform you can easily add a catalog front end, and then orchestration software like CA Process Automation to deliver true hands free and repeatable cloud based services. Your end users or customers will have access to self-service cloud based computing resources, core computing power, storage, operating systems, and applications. And all of this functionality and more is securely delivered by CA AppLogic running on commodity server and infrastructure hardware.
Typical Use Cases
Package applications for on-demand delivery
CA AppLogic allows you to run many instances of one or more prepackaged web applications. This enables delivering access to internal users, or selling access to high-value on demand applications such as CRM, Email, VoIP PBX and many others. CA AppLogic makes it easy to create a copy of the desired application for each customer, configure it with a unique IP address and hardware resources, and have it running within minutes - without operator involvement. The whole process can be automated and driven by your customers as part of the ordering page on your website. Users can subscribe inexpensively, starting their application with just a fraction of a server, and then scale-out whenever their needs increase and they're ready to pay for it.
Deploy your applications on prepackaged infrastructure
If you are a software developer and don't enjoy configuring servers and infrastructure, CA AppLogic makes it extremely easy to deploy scalable web applications without dedicated 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 CA AppLogic is easy. Pick a standard infrastructure assembly from the catalog, copy your HTML files, scripts code and database onto the logical volumes and start your application.
The catalog assemblies are built by IT experts and ready for production deployment. They've been carefully instrumented so that you can use the CA AppLogic monitoring system as a visual debugging tool that shows you what's happening throughout the 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 CA AppLogic grid every time you rebuild your code.
Scale your online service without building a multi-tenant system
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, CA 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 with CA AppLogic 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 service (and, therefore, your business!), but the resulting system is much more resilient than a large, complex multi-tenant application. In CA AppLogic each application instance carries its own infrastructure, such as databases and application servers so a failure affects only a single customer.
Develop new web applications
If you're developer starting a new application project, CA AppLogic can save time and aggravation by allowing you to build and test your application with the exact middleware and system configuration it'll have in production. Simply copy and start one of the "developer's workbench" applications that come with CA AppLogic; in minutes, you'll 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 designing, building and replicating complex distributed infrastructures; CA AppLogic is the ultimate power trip. Using the CA AppLogic visual infrastructure editor and the catalog of virtual appliances, you can assemble, configure and troubleshoot your system visually. Integrations that took weeks can be done in hours. What's more, CA 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 as well. CA AppLogic's 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. Plus, you can easily save a "known good" state of the application for rollback. You can also SSH into any of the appliances to see what's happening inside them or to fix a problem. 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.