I ran across a press release today about the Morph Application Platform and exchange. It is an SaaS platform built on top of Amazon Web Services technology by a company called Morph Labs Inc. It appears to be very Ruby on Rails specific. With more digging I might find that's not true, but it looks that way. It looks like their blog was launched by their CEO, David Abramowski, on Feb 4th. The service itself is in beta and it is joining a rapidly growing segment of services layered on top of Amazon Web Services.
This segment of service providers is, as I said, growing rapidly. So, if this is PaaS (Platform as a Service) and the software running on the platform is SaaS (Software as a Service) then Amazon must surely be IaaS (Infrastrcuture as a Service).
Of particular note is what they say they layer on top of AWS.
- Automated deployment
- Version management
- 24/7 monitoring
- Load balancing
- Routing
- Database instances
- Continuous backups
- High availability
- Control Panel
- Email Gateway
- OpenID baked in
Those are all things you'd need to take care of yourself one way or another if you launch on AWS in it's "native" state. So, there is value to be found when you compare the DIY costs to the feature set offered by Morph.
So, it definitely looks to be worth keeping an eye on as the cloud computing space continues to evolve.
References:
Features - http://www.morphexchange.com/map_info
Various Web Sites