Makara officially launched this week as company providing technology that facilitates speedy deployment of applications, allowing migration between cloud platforms.  The company has some notable backers including Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen.  The Makara product is an application management tool for virtual environments.   The tool provides flexibility and makes it easy to port applications across virtual environments and the cloud as it is designed to fit under the application stack, but above the hypervisor.   CEO Isaac Roth and CTO Tobias Kunze Briseno say that platform approach is similar to a “capsule” that envelopes the applications, making it possible for developers to provision applications between cloud providers or across clusters.   The company offers a free two node developer version or an “on-demand” pay as you go product based on hourly usage.   An Enterprise Version is available with volume pricing ranging from $2,250 to $3000 per node.

Makara’s Cloud Application Platform can run on VMware Workstation, VMware ESX, VirtualBox and Xen,  Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud,  and Terremark vCloud Express.   It supports PHP, Java, Flex, TomCat and JBoss applications.   By moving application management to the platform layer, managing applications becomes less complex and more cost-effective,” stated Issac Roth, CEO of Makara. “Even moving between cloud environments is easy with Makara’s Cloud Application Platform because all the application code, configuration, and dependencies are stored in the Makara application capsule.”

Related Link:

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/02/02/andreessen-backed-cloud-launcher-makara-debuts/