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Morph Labs introduces new service for iPhone developers

Last Monday, Apple announced that more than 60 million applications for the iPhone have already been downloaded. At the same day, Morph Labs launched its new service for iPhone developers, allowing them to build applications and deploy them to the Morph AppSpace service, a fully managed environment for running web applications. Click here for a full read of this announcement.

With this new service, developers will enjoy the simplicity of running applications without the need to set up their own application environments. It only takes a few minutes to get an application running and ready to be submitted to Apple's App Store.

Developers also have the flexibility in scaling their applications to meet demand requirements. Let's take a look at how you can get started:

First, you can subscribe to a free developer plan to test out the service. All you need to have is a ready application. You get 1 cube*, 1GB of DB, 3GB of data transfer, 1 GB storage all for free. Click here for pricing information on Morph AppSpace subscriptions. What is a cube? Think of a Morph AppSpace cube as a place where your application runs and performs its job. Cubes are deployed on demand throughout our infrastructure at a moment's notice.

Second, you can go live with your application by simply adding credits to your account and choosing a larger size for your Morph AppSpace subscription.

Morph Labs handles all of the nitty-gritty details associated with deploying, delivering, and managing your application environment. You don't have to deal with infrastructure, so you can focus on building apps.

Now is the time to take advantage of the iPhone web application market. Feel free to send us an email at info [at] mor [dot] ph.

Last Monday, Apple announced that more than 60 million applications for the iPhone have already been downloaded. At the same day, Morph Labs launched its new service for iPhone developers, allowing them to build applications and deploy them to the Morph AppSpace service, a fully managed environment for running web applications. Click here for a full read of this announcement.

With this new service, developers will enjoy the simplicity of running applications without the need to set up their own application environments. It only takes a few minutes to get an application running and ready to be submitted to Apple's App Store.

Developers also have the flexibility in scaling their applications to meet demand requirements. Let's take a look at how you can get started:

First, you can subscribe to a free developer plan to test out the service. All you need to have is a ready application. You get 1 cube*, 1GB of DB, 3GB of data transfer, 1 GB storage all for free. Click here for pricing information on Morph AppSpace subscriptions. What is a cube? Think of a Morph AppSpace cube as a place where your application runs and performs its job. Cubes are deployed on demand throughout our infrastructure at a moment's notice.

Second, you can go live with your application by simply adding credits to your account and choosing a larger size for your Morph AppSpace subscription.

Morph Labs handles all of the nitty-gritty details associated with deploying, delivering, and managing your application environment. You don't have to deal with infrastructure, so you can focus on building apps.

Now is the time to take advantage of the iPhone web application market. Feel free to send us an email at info [at] mor [dot] ph.

Olympic 2008 Commences, Morph Labs' New Office Opens

08.08.08 marked not only the beginning of the Summer Olympics in Beijing. Last Friday, Morph Labs (together with Exist Global and Global Gateway Venture Capital G2VC) celebrated the launch of its new home -- the G2VC Innovation Center in Manila, Philippines.

The celebration dubbed "Going for Gold" puts forth our tenet: bag the gold medal in our own "sports" -- technology and innovation, just as the thousands of Olympic athletes, who are bidding for honor and glory for their respective countries.

We invite you to take a look at some of the pictures below. And if you want to have an idea of how much we strive for excellence, you might want to read about what our customers are saying about our platform as a service offering.

Morph Affiliate Program

If you have visited the site at Mor.ph, you may have read about this. It would be good to note that there are plenty of opportunities with our product and services and it's not just limited to developers who leverage the Morph Appspace for their Rails, Grails and Java web applications.

You, too can earn money by simply spreading the word about Mor.ph. Watch the video and learn how.

Morph Appspace Powers Web 2.0 Applications

Is there a person who isn't amazed by how technology just keeps making things simple and complicated at the same time? Well, you might say that it all depends on the person although basically technology, like in the case of websites and all web-related stuff should first and foremost be user-friendly. Right? But unfortunately, in most cases, it takes some geekiness to work things out but it isn't just in the domain of users. You might be surprised that geekiness also has levels and even tech persons or developers wrestle with a lot of things like deployment tools and configuration. Duh.

You may want to read about what Jim James was able to discover and leverage as a platform for his wonderful idea. His MyTripScrapbook (built ruby on rails, if you care) allows travelers to easily share their experiences with families and friends. It is not text-fancy but photo-fancy - just what a scrapbook should look like. Discover for yourself by signing up because it's free.

So, in case you have an idea for a web application or a site like Jim's, you may want to find out about Morph Appspace first and find out what real managed hosting solutions for Web 2.0 should be like.

Quick shout: LA Web Application Developers Meetup happens Aug 5 at Rubicon Project. Details here.

Software as a Service for ISVs - Final

How many definitions of Platform as a Service (PaaS) have you come across with? Maybe you've read about Saugatuck's opinions or if you're a wiki-lover, you've read this. And definitely, if you've followed Morph Labs closely, you would have stumbled on this podcast or the three layers of cloud computing.

It is much a buzzword just as "in the cloud" is. In this post, how about we just give you analogies?

Analogy 1. You need transportation to get you from your house to work. Now, would you get an engine, a set of wheels and a chassis? You could assemble these into transportation, but do you really want to spend your time doing that? Do you have the skills to do it?

On the other hand, platform as a service providers offer you a car. You just get in and drive to work. Now apply this to applications. Morph Labs' value proposition is that our environment is ready to accept the application, removing the tasks of configuring/setting up servers, load balancers and databases. You could build a system on Amazon EC2, for instance to deliver a Grails application, but then you are spending your time building out the delivery platform. This also assumes that as a developer, you understand how to build out such an architecture to ensure that your applications are available, are backed up properly and are serviced over the long run.

Here is a link to Cleve Gibbon's article mentioning this analogy.

Analogy 2. Think of platform as a service as a fully serviced office. You just pick a package, move right in and get to work. You'll have a desk to work on, you're equipped with connectivity, and you'll even have people to help you manage incoming calls. In addition, you won't even have to think about facility maintenance.

So there you go. And yes, let me say this: don't take our word for it. BUT do hear out what our customers say about us.

Send us an email at info at mor dot ph if you'd like to know more about our services. OH! Here's a link to the webinar that I mentioned in the previous post.

Introducing the Morph Development Partners

You have a business centered around a software product or service that you think is worth putting all your resources to. First, you go at it alone comfortably with development only to find out that you need to spend a few hundred dollars more on deployment as it is part of the customer negotiations which you initially, reluctantly agreed to. Luckily, you find out that there's an easier way to do all that and let's you just focus on your core competency. Time for the Morph Partner Program.



Deploy scalable on-demand Rails applications without hiring additional IT staff for managing infrastructure. Simplify Software as a Service innovation and build success around your business by signing up to the Morph Partner Program.

Whether you are a Rails developer, ISV, consultant, technology provider, re-seller, or an entrepreneur, Morph's Partner Program is your vehicle for success.

We are happy to announce that Morph is now joined by five (5) new Development Partners namely; Atlantic Dominion Solutions, ASAP Websoft, Lumatila, SurgeWorks and WisdomGroup. Stay tuned as we keep you posted on the people behind these companies, their work and how the partnership with Morph brings mutual value to the businesses.

Related:
ADS Eliminates EC2 Overhead with Morph Application Platform

SaaS: Another S for Solutions

I just happen to come across fairly recent articles regarding SaaS adoption which I think provides meaningful insight that tends to dispel the thinking that it's all about hype. Maybe the 'spread like wildfire' phase has slowed down and the real acceptance has begun but nonetheless, it proves that business and people are always on the prowl for solutions to their problems. Who isn't anyway?

Saugatech has just posted a snippet of their recent research regarding increasing 'front door' acquisition. It does mean that SaaS is now being embraced as a formal business solution and not simple 'test and deploy', 'small group of users' alternatives. (You can visit the site for more SaaS research news).

Next stop: Krissi Danielson's recent podcast with Jim Heeger of Payscale. Mr. Heeger in all simplicity pointed out that 'small businesses' do not necessarily think about SaaS solutions because current wisdom says it's tailored for small groups. Instead, he says it's still mostly because these businesses 'they?re just looking to get a specific job done' and don't necessarily went out looking for technology solutions.

And we at Mor.ph believe so, too.

Software as a Service for ISVs - Part 3

A very much delayed post, but still. (Initially had plans of "podcasting" the second to the finale ... ended up with a quick and easy webinar. Soon to post here!) Anyway, let's move on to the next deployment models.

Hosted applications - one application, one tenant

The easiest path to Software as a Service is hosting a web application on behalf of a tenant, in other words a customer organization. This style is reminiscent of ASP (Application Service Provider) offerings. In this deployment model, the ISV deploys an individual version of the application for each customer. This model has some great benefits. An ISV can quickly take an existing web-based application and make it available as a service. By deploying on behalf of a customer, the ISV can use its expertise to minimize implementation issues. Also with this model, the customer can enjoy a hassle-free experience without having to think about infrastructure, servers, data centers, or system administrators.

On the flip side, this model poses challenges to the ISVs that are typically based in costs. When an application is deployed for a customer, the ISV must create an environment for each of those applications that is enterprise-quality -- meaning the environment is fault-tolerant, has disaster recovery capabilities, has the ability to scale, to name a few. These quickly may drive the cost of hosting a single application past the price point that the customer is willing to pay.

Let us look at an example. Let?s say that Frabitz Co. sells and markets a web application for HR Management. They want to offer this solution to customers in a hosted model. For each customer, Frabitz will deploy five servers to provide an enterprise-quality environment. Two load balancers, two web servers, and a database server. In addition, they will have to setup ongoing backups and monitoring from an external system. Using Amazon Web Services pricing model, the cost of this simple environment would be a minimum of $362.50 per month just for the ?bare metal? not including data storage or data transfer fees. This base fee would need to be included in the price to the customer.

Adding this new capability to service customers also means that the ISV must extend its business from developing software to managing a series of complex environments on behalf of its customers. This means the hiring of system administrators, 7x24 support, and emergency response. So in our example above, the $362.50 per month must now be increased to support the cost of the new business extension.

The ISV can quickly see how a subscription rate of $1,000 per month would be a minimum for this type of hosted service. This level of subscription eliminates a giant segment of the market from the ISV. At such a price point, the small and medium-sized businesses will more than likely look for other solutions.

Multi-tenant applications - one application for many tenants

The most advantageous deployment method of Software as a Service is the multi-tenant application. This deployment method takes a single application and enables it to facilitate multiple tenants (or companies). It also ensures that data, preferences, and customizations for each tenant are kept distinct and separate. In this model, each tenant can have hundreds to thousands of individual users all running on the same back-end systems. The prime example of a multi-tenant application is Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com hosts a giant version of their application yet they allow thousands of tenants to use that application all while keeping each tenant?s data and interactions separate from one another. Multi-tenancy has a tremendous advantage for the ISV - cost consolidation and skyrocketing margins to start with. By consolidating tenants into one running version of the application, economies of scale come into play for the ISV. (Need another example of a multi-tenant application? Check this.)

Let us build upon the Frabitz example. Frabitz decided to enable multi-tenancy in its web-based HR application. They re-architect their database schemas and update the application to ensure that the software can handle multiple tenants individually and without conflict with other tenants. Frabitz then can deploy its application one time to an enterprise-quality environment and reap the benefits of a growing customer base. In this model, every time Frabitz adds a new customer, there is no direct fixed cost increase as there is in the hosted model. As a matter of fact, well behaved web applications can support hundreds of tenants on a small scale environment. The ISV has tremendous leverage in this case.

Nevertheless, deploying a single instance of the software for several tenants is fraught with its own challenges -- scalability, data separation and management to name a few. You have to be able to create an enterprise-quality environment for your web application. You would have to think about how to manage those complex back-end work. These and a lot more challenges aren't impossible to overcome (traditional software vendors must take heed). And this is where Platform as a Service comes into play. We'll cut this blog and will tackle Platform as a Service up next.

Gartner's Cloud Computing Risks and the SaaS Trust and Confidence

Beyond the hype and the debate, cloud computing as mainstream is pretty much an inevitability especially with the oil crisis sparking worldwide calls for heightened belt-tightening measures in all facets of life both personal and business. Throw in environmental concerns, and having thousands of servers working at half-capacity needing electric-powered cooling for efficiency is an ugly site to behold. (We're not even mentioning really tech-stuff reasons yet)

But the road to cloud efficiency and security is fraught with wolves aiming for easy prey. Better to arm yourself with the right information before you take the plunge.

Read about Gartner's Cloud Computing Risks and learn to plug away your valid concerns. Then treat yourself for a second heap by hopping over to what Mor.ph has done to address important SaaS questions.

Because it's not necessarily a hype or blind faith thing. It's earned trust and confidence that builds relationships. And that's what the Morph Appspace is all about.

Software as a Service for ISVs - Part 2

Distribution and management of a thick client - one application, one user

Thick clients are applications which are installed locally on the users computer and remain on that computer. These thick clients were typically delivered via physical media such as CDs or DVDs. When you think of thick clients, you can think of Symantec Anti-virus, Adobe Photoshop, or Apple iTunes. All of these are thick clients that are installed on the endpoint. In the Software as a Service model, companies are changing their delivery model from physical media to over-the-Internet provisioning and licensing via application downloads.

The back-end systems to deliver and manage the distribution of thick clients are typically custom-built by the ISVs and integrated with their e-Commerce storefronts. Symantec for example allows you to visit their online store, purchase a copy of their software, immediately download it, and obtain your license key -- all through the Internet without the intervention of a human. This is software delivery as a service, which has proven to be quite an efficient delivery model for applications when compared to retails stores or physical media distribution.

Implementation of this type of web-based delivery system is highly dependent upon the business model of the ISV. There are dozens of 3rd party e-commerce solutions in the marketplace today that assist a company in digital downloads and licensing management. Although Morph Labs does not provide an out-of-the-box electronic software delivery system, many of these stand-alone solutions can run within a Morph AppSpace subscription, allowing the ISVs to take advantage of a complete end-to-end infrastructure to run their business.

Application session delivery - one application, many users

One enterprise approach for software as a service is the delivery of a virtual session to an end user. In this model, ISVs or enterprises physically run the software within their own data center. They are then delivering a session to the end user via the Internet. This deployment style of Software as a Service has been popular in some enterprise companies.

It provides the ability to take existing applications and extend their reach securely within or beyond the enterprise. ?It eliminates the need to physically install and manage thick clients across a wide range of computers reducing IT costs.
?
As an example, a large financial service organization does not want to expose their internal accounting software to the Internet at large. Therefore, the organization uses a session delivery suite such as one provided by Citrix to securely enable external users to interact with an internal system.

Although effective for many enterprise companies, this option doesn?t seem extensible for the ISV who is looking to build a new market via Software as a Service. There is added cost of the infrastructure to power the applications as well as the proprietary software needed to support this environment. Typically the end user must install a thick client or download a one-time-use client every time they connect to the service. This extra step will prove to be a barrier to adoption for mass market applications.

Software as a Service for ISVs - Part 1

Our Social Media Analyst (aka Friarminor) talked about the Platform as a Service (PaaS) hype a little earlier. In this post, we're going to discuss about deployment models, linking Software as a Service (SaaS) and PaaS into the discussion. This is a series of posts that we'll tackle in the next few days. Let's start.

Delivering SaaS is a business model that has taken hold in today?s Internet-enabled environment. Companies big and small are looking to their software vendors to provide more and more applications through a subscription-based service available anytime to anyone connected to the Internet.

Some Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) have quickly adapted to this new marketplace and model. Some vendors such as Salesforce.com have led the way in proving that the model can work, even when mission-critical data is at stake. Double digit growth rates and exposure to brand new markets have made Software as a Service an attractive new channel around the globe.

The convergence of Software as a Service with the availability of virtual data centers has leveled the playing field for many ISVs. No longer does the ISV need to build and maintain a data center from the ground up to support a Software as a Service offering. The ISV is able to leverage on-demand resources and build its own delivery environment without ever having to purchase a single server.

On the surface, software as a service is easily defined but under the covers the implementation can be complicated for a vendor. Architecting, building, and managing highly available, fault tolerant application delivery environments require a great deal of skill, time, and money. To level the playing field, a new category of software has arisen called Platform as a Service. This end-to-end application environment that combines technology with managed services holds promise for ISVs allowing them to focus on innovation.

Software as a Service comes in many flavors depending on the different types of software available today. Traditional ?thick client? software packages look to SaaS to provide an online delivery and updating mechanism. Enterprise applications look to extend beyond the data center through session delivery services. Individual web applications can be hosted on a per customer basis. And the emergence of multi-tenant applications puts the power of the web to work for the ISVs. All of these delivery methods excluding session delivery can benefit from Platform as a Service today.

PaaS: Imperfect Cloud Has Got to Have a Silver Lining

With all the talk about 'cloud' coming on all fronts online, most of it dwelling on the pros and cons of adoption, it is a safe bet that many will form their own preference for what a cloud should be.It would take no less than an ambitious task to create the perfect cloud for all - be it dev guys to regular web users. But first, every provider has got to lay their options and then the process of picking out the standard begins. Wince.

PaaS or Platform as a Service (don't you just hate saying that :) has taken upon itself the innovative task of luring more early adopters to the cloud concept. PaaS provides the ease of deployment, hastens the learning curve and metaphorically, sweetens the bitter pill. And what better way there is than by getting the best of open sourced technologies and bundling them up. No lock-ins and no surprises.

So where's the innovation in that, some might ask? Well, as simple as it may all sound, it does take a lot of effort to create which unfortunately most of the people, even if they know how, doesn't have the time nor resources to mess with it. Put in design interface and valuable metrics, you've got palatable PaaS ready for the taking. Cost-effective and hassle-free.

So, until we can get the cloud to function like an easy-to-switch-to electric grid (or plug n play, if you like), expect a lot more innovations in the PaaS scene. What those specifics are? Don't have all the answers but I'm sure it has nothing to do with proprietary.

Ruby Slip-per Then Back to 'Live'

Just have to slip this quick Ruby and Rails fix for our friends who attended POSS and are interested about becoming 'rock star' developers in the future.

Some Ruby and Ruby on Rails (whatever your choice of starting point) online resource for newbies.

Guru or just plain Satish, he'd definitely welcome you as a Ruby pupil. Visit Ruby Learning and enroll like in a college course without the school fees.

74 Quality Ruby on Rails Resources and Tutorials

Neighborly Advice: By the time you get through this list, you're certified.

Why? I dunno. But it's one clever piece of hands-on tutorial that has a certain special quality about it. Poignant.

Any other cool resource I may have missed? Feel free to comment so we could add to the list. Now, back to our 'live' show for the week.

Of if's and else's

If almost everything is turning into a commodity,

First things first, I'd like to give credit to Erle of Exist Global, who owns this blog site title.

Meet-a-Mor.ph-POSS-ees

It was a good week for the POSS event notwithstanding the typhoon that threatened to wash all he preparations down the drain. You cannot be there and not see us at all. Mor.ph was there at the event the whole time: at the exhibit booths, plenary sessions and the breakout sessions - which for most of the attendees provided the highlights of the event.

The session on Ruby on Rails punctuated by the SaaS and PaaS connection (courtesy of Morph Labs' CEO David A.) was packed with nary a pair of ears not tuned-in to the value of the celebrated programming language and the promise of the new deployment model.

Indeed, Open Source and Mor.ph - do make a great match.

For event rundowns, you may click here.

Spike Stop

What is the one thing that irks web app users more often than forgotten passwords? Deteriorating response times. I used to often hear that some Facebook users had stopped adding and sharing apps when they began experiencing significantly lower response times. Twitter shared the same difficulty at several points in time.

Ultimately, this relates to an application's scalability. Scalability relates to the "ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner, or to be readily enlarged."

Scalability is an indispensable characteristic for web applications. Web applications that kickoff as a single application running on a server (or a combination of server/web server) and supported by a second application server (in the case the first application server fails) might potentially fail to serve increasing inbound requests. Web applications (or websites) that receive a fair amount of traffic do not have to contend with being able to scale, but is this the perpetual scenario?

As a web application developer, have you thought about your web applications' scalability? Todd Hoff shares some lessons learned. At Morph Labs, we encourage you to show off your Rails and/or Java application by running it on our end-to-end managed hosting platform. If your product hits a spike, we can help you scale. You wouldn't want your web app to simply stop running.

Spike Stop

Wikipedia describes scalability as "a desirable property of a system, a network, or a process, which indicates its ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner, or to be readily enlarged."

In reality, most web apps kickoff as a single application running on an appserver or appserver/webserver combination and potentially communicating with a database. Many if not all of the functions are likely to exist within a monolithic application code base making use of the same physical and virtual resources of the system upon which the functions operate: memory, cpu, disk, network interfaces, etc. Potentially the engineers have the forethought to make the system highly available by positioning a second application server in the mix to be used in the event that the first application server fails.

This monolithic design will likely work fine for many sites that receive low levels of traffic. However, if the product is very successful and receives wide and fast adoption user perceived response times are likely to significantly degrade to the point that the product is almost entirely unusable. At some point, the system will likely even fail under the load as the inbound request rate is significantly greater than the processing power of the system and the resulting departure rate of responses to requests.

A great engineering team will think about how to scale their platform well in advance of such a catastrophic failure.

Morph-spottin'

There's a great chance that you will find Morph presence online such as news and articles especially on the SaaS and PaaS front but it doesn't mean you cannot see and meet us in person. And we have the pictures to prove we exist.

RailsConf 2008 in Portland

Joomla! Day Philippines (ok, not us but you bet it's me who took this picture of Johan Jannsens, Joomla Core Team Developer :)

Oh, and if you will be somewhere in Asia this coming week, you can check us out to at the Philippine Open Source Summit.

See you there.

Call Us Disruptive, Too.

Courtesy of free-online-private-pilot-ground-school.com

Disruption does precede innovation most of the time but what if both run side-by-side? Then, better believe that IT will see the most profound changes in the next few years according to Gartner.

"Gartner defines a disruptive technology as one that causes major change in ?the accepted way of doing things?, including business models, processes, revenue streams, industry dynamics and consumer behaviour."

With so much change occurring in the industry what are the most important trends to watch?

The technology and business foundations for a second Internet revolution are in place. Many enterprises are now looking beyond Web 2.0 at the concept of cloud computing to manage shared computing resources.

Read about Gartner's Top Ten Disruptive Technologies here. Then find out about Mor.ph and see where you can pencil us in that list.

Start-ups, open source and POSS

A good friend at Hyderabad sent this piece of news about the recent Open Source Entrepreneurship Forum that his organization had put up. It sounds really intriguing and I'm reminded of Thomas Friedman's words, "For most companies, the commercial future belongs to those who know how to make the richest chocolate sauce, the sweetest, lightest whipped cream, and the juiciest cherries to sit on top, or how to put them all together into a sundae."

If you have been following Morph, you'd know by now that we have built our solutions using open source technologies.

In fact, we have implemented a similar kind of gathering -- 'twas the boot camp called Morph Code. Morph Code spawned a lot of interest just as the Hyderabad meetup did. (Read up the blogs about Morph Code here.)

Seems like there are (really) endless possibilities when we speak of innovation today.

And speaking of open source, the upcoming Philippine Open Source Summit is happening on June 23-24 at Morphlabs' hometown Cebu. We hope to see you there.

Morph AppSpace subscriptions for Java now available

Calling all Java developers! Morph AppSpace for Java is now here. Sign up and deploy your Java web application on a Morph AppSpace today.

This fully managed hosting environment supports Grails too.

And oh, don't forget to sign up for our Developer News Wire. We've got tons (well, lots) of exciting stuff coming soon -- and wouldn't you want to be the first to know about them?

Bandwidth solved, what now?

Quality of telco infrastructure is crucial for the growth of Software as a Service. Just the other day, a $550-million fiber-optic cable network link was launched in La Union, Philippines. Report says that, "The cable landing facility in Bauang, La Union links to the Asia-America Gateway (AAG) project, a 20,000-kilometer long network that will connect Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei Darussalam, Vietnam, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii, and the US West Coast."

Whew. This could potentially lead to significant new business opportunities especially along the lines of Software as a Service. Just imagine how this could dramatically improve connectivity among and within organizations. Imagine the possibilities of doing business on the web.

On one hand, enterprises can start to look into the non-critical, non-sensitive data and business processes and begin to evaluate SaaS application alternatives to manage such. SaaS entails low risk -- there's no upfront investment, no hardware to purchase, no additional IT manpower to hire. Small and medium-sized businesses can take advantage of this opportunity to utilize technology in order to improve productivity.

On the other hand, software vendors can start to re-architect their applications to the on-demand model. (A link here to our presentation on Global Opportunities through Software as a Service.) Morph Labs can help software vendors who are interested to deliver web applications on-demand.

If you are a software firm specializing in Ruby on Rails and/or Java, drop us an email at info at mor dot ph or visit our partner page here.

Portland In Rails

It's almost time!

"Happening May 29-June 1, 2008 in Portland, Oregon, RailsConf is *the* official event for the growing Rails community. If you're passionate about Rails and what it helps you achieve?or are curious about how Rails can help you create web applications better and faster?RailsConf is the place to be.

Over three years after its initial release, Rails continues to shake the foundations of the web development world. With an ever-growing host of stable applications in production, Rails 2.0 changes the focus from rapid change and innovation to stabilization and maturity."

Not only are we sponsors of the event, Morph-sters will be there to participate, too so see yah!

Lifesavers

I'm well aware of the image above but just found this, below and noticed something's familiar. If you can't spot the difference, you need major help?

Facebook Developers Can Now Embrace Openness

Whatever the real reason, Facebook has just announced that it plans to open source the code to its platform but leaving out the specifics. It just makes for an interesting thought whether this was meant to benefit the developers or just a panicky counter move to the creeping Friend Connect or Open Social initiative. It's still about the data, you know.

Nevertheless, Facebook developers have every reason to smile as the Morph Appspace makes deployment a cinch even quicker than the time for you to reach the end of this post.

User-Centric Design Is Good for SaaS

It feels odd to be talking about 'design' in the same sentence along with SaaS and PaaS. Cloud compute and all its nuances just don't evoke that same feeling that moves anyone to start a talk centered on aesthetics. After all, developers and programmers get their kicks from the beauty of code most of the time. Or do they?

On a timely note coinciding with the launch of our new look, Ben Kepes just posted something about a SaaS product which in his words is, "functional but ugly." That sounded harsh but let's admit it, we still are all, enamored by beauty that functionality alone isn't enough to keep our interests. Balance is key.

Does anybody care about user-centricity? John Maeda does. I believe we do, too. Very much.

All this fuss about PaaS

McKinsey & Company had published this long paper on SaaS platforms, commonly known as Platform as a Service (PaaS). Funny thing that Alain Yap, our Social Media Analyst, referred me to an excerpt shortly after I finished reading. Silly me reading all of that fuss about PaaS when I can just go follow Peter Laird's Twitter Microfeed on SaaS, PaaS and cloud markets.

Anyhow, we talk (a lot) about our platform over at our website. Thought you might want to listen to an interview of ebizQ's Krissi Danielsson with Morph Labs' CEO David Abramowski on Platform as a Service. Here's the link.

Enjoy!

Catching the Long Tail via SaaS

It was mentioned in one of today's sessions at the 12th ICT Professionals' Congress that an enterprise would have to invest from about 1 to 5 million pesos for an ERP implementation. System, rather. And roughly 12 to 25% would be the cost for maintaining such -- that is, if the enterprise wants to receive upgrades to make sure that the system still serves its purpose. Wow, that's a fairly big amount. Not for the large-sized organizations maybe, but for the small to medium-sized businesses. Add to that hardware and manpower costs needed to support the system.

A fellow participant was telling me just how frustrating managing applications can be. He says that oftentimes, "when we upgrade, hardware requirements change ... that actually means we'll have to acquire a more robust platform to run the application." Further, he cites that upgrades don't happen overnight, leading to days -- weeks lost due to assembling the right specs and just getting the upgraded system up and running.

This isn't something new, really. We can't blame the software vendors for putting such a high price on the apps they're selling. Why? Let's build a story about a software vendor who builds supply chain management applications. Contrary to out-of-the-box software alternatives, SCM apps tend to be custom-tailored to meet the needs of the customer. This would require on-site visits, installation and even a dedicated staff to manage the application. (Add to that dedicated hardware to run the application.) Now, how much will this SCM app be sold then? Of course, the price has to be at least the total cost of providing all of the above mentioned things.

In other words, software vendors have to make money in the end.

Oh, don't small and medium-sized enterprises want to make money, too? At the very least maybe they'd want to save on capex, streamline processes by taking advantage of technology, to name a few.

About some ten years ago, we began to see changes in the way software was distributed. This method, which has become one of the hottest buzzwords in the industry, called Software as a Service (SaaS), has steadily began to open up bigger markets both in the supply and demand-side of things. It used to be that software apps (especially line of business applications) were only available to companies who had large budgets and the appropriate skill sets needed to support the applications. In the case of the software vendors -- well there are a lot of things -- but one worthy thing to note is that they always had to deal with high costs of revenue.

SaaS has opened a bigger market for innovators around the world. Chris Andersen, who popularized the concept of the Long Tail, explains that online retailers such as Ebay are uniquely positioned to fill a huge demand which brick-and-mortar stores cannot serve cost-effectively. The same applies for Software as a Service vendors.

SaaS enables software vendors to offer solutions at a much lower cost than vendors who sell software licenses. In addition, SaaS greatly reduces IT complexities closely associated with software installation and maintenance. They get, "bigger revenues through smaller sales," as Kevin Laws puts it.

Tomorrow at the Congress, Morph Labs will present on the evolution (or revolution, as some would say) of how software is delivered. We will also kick around with related topics such as Platform as a Service, open source and the much speculated business of the Web. Hope you can join us!

Have Business? Use the Grid

There isn't a lot of business now that doesn't require the use of those boxes stuffed with chips and hard drives.

Right? In more ways than one, it is. Consider that statement and see what is missing. That statement is about hardware and with hardware, naturally comes ... software. Well, not anymore - not the traditional, license-in-a-box we're all used too -and that is information for businesses to ponder, too.

Traditional licensed software would just be a thing of the past if the 'grid' is to be packaged as it should.

The ability to deliver different elements of applications simultaneously over a cohesive network of servers essentially defines grid computing, also known as distribute computing. Grids embrace software or middleware, which enables a user community to make use of the combined power of networked hardware and access applications across the public Internet as services.

Want to know what makes the Grid special? Read more here.

Software MetaMORPHosis

You won?t see the price of gas coming down any time soon. So is the adoption of SaaS.

The trend to use the Internet to deliver software applications on an on-demand basis called Software as a Service or SaaS is here to stay. SaaS is not a new concept in the connected world, but what makes it the technology buzzword of today?

Jerome Gotangco, our Platform Manager, will be presenting at the 12th ICT Professionals' Congress this Thursday, that's the 15th of May about software's metamorphosis. In this session, we?ll discuss how SaaS has become a pervasive concept in the connected economy, its potential to harness the global market, and how Philippine innovators can take advantage of it. We?ll also compare how different the traditional service delivery model is to SaaS. We'll also discuss related SaaS enablers like Platform as a Service (PaaS), Open Source and online communities.

This year's ICT Professionals' Congress will once again "bring technology leaders to an event that inspires, informs, and provokes discussion" in the IT industry. More information can be found here.

As a sponsor, Morph Labs looks forward to significantly contributing to "keep the level of competence of the Filipino IT professionals at par with the world?s". See you there!

PC now stands for "Past Center"

It was just a few years ago (at least for me) that the Personal Computer or PC became the primary instrument that ruled over my diverse interests. Not only did it made things a lot easier, it even allowed me and surely millions of other people to integrate fun, awe and wonder to work and productivity. But guess what? It is now time to turn the wheel and move again.

Amy Wohl has an excellent post on how PC is becoming passe or more aptly, PaaSse. It does lend credence to the direction that Morph Labs is pursuing. And that feels good.

Agree?

Calling Morph Application Platform developers

As you know, we launched our Morph AppSpace subscriptions after ending our closed beta with a bang. Now, would you like to be in the SPOTLIGHT? We are going to write up your stories and experiences with the Morph Application Platform. (You know, we might give you special offers too.) Simply send an email to info [at] mor.ph if you're willing to give us some love.

By the way, you might be interested to receive invites to the developer preview of the Morph Application Platform for Java. Visit www.mor.ph/java for more information. If you want to read up on what's new with the Morph Application Platform, you may visit our release notes blog. We also maintain a community forum here.

Cloud Coexistence: Solving the Ruby and Java Conundrum

Like the proverbial Babel Tower, development platforms for Web 2.0 tend to be a disruptive factor among programmers. Protective of their own turfs, supporters of each scripting language tend to lose composure and rant it out sometimes.

Check out how the comparisons and showdowns between Ruby and Java have gone through the years with a few select articles.

2005
Slashdot Ruby- Java Showdown
YARJC
IBM asks if there is room for both
2006
PHP joins in
2008
CommunityOne Face-Off - Fresh!
Ruby vs Java Conundrum

But things are taking shape which will allow both or eventually, most of the languages to thrive. Ruby and Java can co-exist in his web world and Morph Labs is taking a step towards that direction. Enter the Morph Application Platform for Java.

Developers never had it so easy, don't you think?

You can read about what other people are saying about it here.

Java Edition of Morph Application Platform Announced Today

The press release came out this morning announcing the Java Edition of the Morph Application Platform. You can see the official release here or attached below. If you are at JavaONE in San Francisco, stop by to see a demonstration of the Java Edition of the Morph Application Platform at the Webtide Kiosk located at 1224-4 in the JavaOne Pavilion or by visiting our Java site.

The Java Edition of the Morph Application Platform is currently in a limited Developer Preview at this time. Sign-up today to receive your invitation before they are all gone!

###

New On-Demand Platform as a Service to Enable Java and Ajax Over the Cloud

- Morph Labs and Webtide join forces to create Java edition of Morph Application Platform and meet market demand for portable Java applications without vendor lock-in
JavaOne Conference 2008

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Morph Labs and Webtide today announced the launch of a new platform version to enable developers to deploy, deliver and manage Java applications without the time and expense of setting up and managing a web delivery environment.

The Morph Application Platform for Java, a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that virtualizes the application environment and leverages cloud computing resources such as the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is now in limited developer preview.

Webtide, the team behind Jetty, has brought that Java web server to the Morph Application Platform. Through its developer advice and support, Webtide has played a key role in the implementation of Java into the Morph Application Platform to extend the functionality to include deploying and delivering Java applications.

Based on open standards and best of breed open source technology, the Morph Application Platform provides developers with an end to end web application environment that includes load balancing, high availability infrastructure, distributed computing, virtualized web stacks, databases, managed backups and 24x7 monitoring. It puts developers in control and provides an alternative to building and maintaining an infrastructure, or the need to invest in costly hardware. It also provides scalable resources and an environment that can grow or shrink as required through the push of a button, allowing Java developers to support customers yet avoid over-provisioning.

?The Java market is clamoring for a solution that matches our Ruby on Rails Platform as a Service,? said David Abramowski, CEO of Morph Labs. ?By adding Java support to the Morph Application Platform we are ahead of Google?s App Engine, which only lets developers write web applications in Python with caveats. We know that great software requires open, standards based environments and that is exactly what we are delivering.?

As the experts behind Jetty, Webtide will work with Morph and extend its developer advice, support and development to companies wanting to migrate or develop new applications that can run on the Morph Application Platform for Java. Webtide will offer conversion packages and expert support subscriptions, such as the ones it offers for distributions of Jetty to auction houses, banks, and online services such as Zimbra?s Collaboration Suite and Desktop, among others.

?Teaming up with Morph Labs provides us with a new way to extend our expertise and offer a comprehensive set of services for the on-demand world? says Adam Lieber, CEO Webtide. ?Our team can help migrate existing Java applications to the Morph Application Platform and provide ongoing advice to ensure the maximum benefit to the customer in terms of most rapid development and best practices in architecture.?

Demonstrations and more information on the Morph Application Platform can be seen at the Webtide Kiosk located at 1224-4 in the JavaOne Pavilion or by visiting the company web site at www.mor.ph/java

About Morph Labs

Morph Labs is the leading enabler of Software as a Service (SaaS) that virtualizes the application environment through the use of open source technologies to simplify the deployment, delivery, and management of web based applications.

Morph Labs uses virtual infrastructures including Amazon Web Services to provide a truly elastic environment for web applications that can be instantly provisioned and seamlessly scaled.

Morph Labs is a global company with headquarters in Cebu City, Philippines with additional in-country operations in Manila along with Los Angeles, California and Austin, Texas in the U.S.A.

www.mor.ph

About Webtide

Webtide is a global company that specializes in supporting and serving scalable Web 2.0 applications using Java, Ajax, and Comet. The company is the lead developer of the open source Jetty:// Java web server and Hightide, a comprehensive toolset for the development of scalable web 2.0 applications..

Webtide engineers are core developers or contributors to Dojo Cometd, Apache Geronimo, Glassfish, Maven, ActiveMQ, Cargo, Agila, ServiceMix, Jetspeed, WADI, and a host of other open source projects. Webtide offers its worldwide clientele development and production support, development, and training. More information on Webtide products and services is available at www.webtide.com

SaaS and instant gratification

I was just reading Bob Warfield's post on Immediate Gratification Matters and he mentioned that:

"Immediate Gratification matters most of all when selling. If prospects can try your application out online, make sure it responds blindingly fast so they can get as far as possible in the evaluation while they are in the mood to look. If a site doesn?t perform well on the trial version, my expectation is that it will perform poorly in production too. That?s not what you want."

Ease of implementation and management is one of the reasons why a lot of people are rapidly adopting Software as a Service (SaaS). Since SaaS apps are readily accessible (via a web-enabled laptop or PC), users immediately interact with the application and make value out of it. When you compare this to the traditional model -- users purchase the software, assembles the server (probably after a certain period when all the right pieces are in place), installs the software, encounters an error -- now what? Big problem. Instant gratification gone.

One of the remarkable characteristics of our Platform as a Service -- Morph AppSpace -- is the ability to scale on-demand and on the fly. If software providers can scale their applications without having to keep their customers waiting, then they've done a good job. If they can scale their apps without having to keep customers waiting, manage not to bring down services, and spend for just what they need -- then that's a job very well done!

By the way, yesterday -- Morph Labs was inducted as a member of the Cebu Educational Foundation for IT or CEDF-IT. Exciting times to come for the Cebu ICT industry!

SaaS and Instant Gratification

Today, Morph Labs was inducted as member of the Cebu Education Development Foundation for IT (Information Technology) or CEDF-IT.
?Tingi? is a uniquely Filipino way of selling and consuming things, allowing a person to buy
almost any conceivable good by the smallest amount/unit that it can be sold. Tingi has been
noted to bring together the common people closer to technology. In fact, it?s fairly similar to the
software delivery method called Software as a Service (SaaS), where the business model usually
follows customers paying only for what they use. In today?s looming market recession, SaaS
becomes an attractive option for many Filipinos who are looking to cut down on IT spending but
still want to take advantage of technology.

Software as a Service simplies Filipino innovation

Today, Morph Labs was inducted as member of the Cebu Education Development Foundation for IT (Information Technology) or CEDF-IT.
?Tingi? is a uniquely Filipino way of selling and consuming things, allowing a person to buy
almost any conceivable good by the smallest amount/unit that it can be sold. Tingi has been
noted to bring together the common people closer to technology. In fact, it?s fairly similar to the
software delivery method called Software as a Service (SaaS), where the business model usually
follows customers paying only for what they use. In today?s looming market recession, SaaS
becomes an attractive option for many Filipinos who are looking to cut down on IT spending but
still want to take advantage of technology.

GoRuCo was Great

The folks at GoRuCo last weekend put on a great event. Josh Knowles and his team of volunteers organized a very professional event with a presenter list chocked full of the who's who in the Ruby and Rails community. Confreaks has the videos from the event, and you can check out the Flickr stream from the event.

Morph was happy to be involved as a sponsor and definitely enjoyed our time in NYC. Congratulations Josh and everyone involved!

iblog4: The Day After

It was my first time to attend this summit and the thing that made an imprint on me was how 'alive' the blogging sub-culture is in the Philippines. It's not just in Metro Manila but spread out all over the country even to foreign shores (like Middle East) where Filipinos who work there are located. There were bloggers of all shapes and sizes, writing about diverse topics - a rare few earning enough for a comfortable life, some writing about their personal advocacies and the rest, might just be sharing their own peculiarities and unique twist as Filipinos to the online community.

Guess it was about time they learn what mor.ph is. There wasn't a bunch of them there but all things considered, it was a good way for mor.ph to spread its reach, as a company proudly running with Filipino skills and IT savvy.

I look forward to the day when there will be more Filipino bloggers writing about technology, SaaS or Platform as a Service stuff and getting to meet and exchange thoughts with them. Right now, there doesn't seem that many. But with mor.ph in the lead, we could expect things to change fast. After all, there's just too many good things and business benefits that we need people to be aware of and to share with.
(Above Photo: saltwater addressing the crowd)

iblog4. Early morning stuff

Morph Labs is an active participant and a sponsor at this event. Here are a couple of thoughts while waiting for the event to start.

7:30 There were only about 10 of us; Early birdies with organizer Janette , expectedly doing some tests with a youtube vid. I'm not sure but I thinks it's the Gorrel guy. Revelations, juicy.
------
8:00 Tried the wifi. Asks for password. I was told they will give us the specs later.
-----
8:30 People were really now coming in with traffic piling up at the registration. Had to go inside as it is beginning to get really warm with the Manila summer. Team is here. Saw Prof Rom at the registration line.

Left seat to check on something and when I came back somebody's already seated. Was confused on which seat to take. Up between view and ease of movin around - toilet or to the Morph desk set at the lobby. Chose ease and access to electrical outlet. Nice.

8:45 Pax are now reading the packet contents. Curious about what Morph is up to. The audience is pretty diverse. I see some students as well as not so young ones. I'm part of the latter.
Such a chore to be lugging bag with an old digicam 'heavy' and Macbook charger.
-----
8:55 Almost 9. Nice venue here at Malcolm. It has been more than 10 years since I've been here and nothing's changed much but first time to be seated here inside the theater. Love the AC. Newsgator to pass the time. Pinoy Bossa music on the background. OST.
-----
9:00 Just saw a guy with a jester hat on. Totally screaming 'Look at me!"
I'm on 9th row so I'm wearing glasses, looking odd.
Where's the connection? Need to post on the iblog4 at the morph eXchange.
I'm itching for some twit twit. Itchy fingers already.
Macbook is still pretty heavy. Wouldn't it be great to have an Eee? I Wish.
-----
9:15 Prof Disini from College of Law - Blogger; So this theater was just newly renovated. Timing. Enough already. Have to listen.

You can also follow this at the iblog4 forum; or if you prefer -my Twits

Morph Labs at iBlog4 Summit

The 4th Philippine Blogging Summit is happening over at Malcolm Hall, UP College of Law today. Blog talks, food, and unlimited coffee! We'll be giving a cool tee to bloggers who'd do a write-up about us. So, if you're in the area, come and say hello. We'd love to talk to you about Morph Labs.

If you want to get involved with the iBlog4 community, log onto iblog4.morphexchange.com.

Cheerio!

Ruby Hero Award

I thought the guy's at RailsEnvy were just makin' fun or something but this has got to be a real treat for the Ruby and Rails community. Doing code sure is grinding at times but this goes to show that they can also be both fun and relevant at the same time.

Care to share your thoughts on who your six (6) recipients will be? Click the pic above and cast your vote.

Ruby Hero Awards

The folks over at RailsEnvy (we sponsored a recent podcast of theirs) have put together The Ruby Hero Awards.

This is a great program designed to recognize the hard-working people in the Ruby and Rails communities who might otherwise not get as much exposure as their work deserves. Check out the site, nominate your Ruby hero, and also note that this application is running on Morph AppSpaces.

Green Way

No doubt, people and most especially, businesses, rely on fossil fuels for everyday living. And with the spiraling costs of oil, people fall into different modes on how to cope up with this dilemma. While most would just flat out, try to earn more money to keep up with the costs, some are wise enough to follow the principles of conservation - that is to use the minimum amount of effort/energy that is enough to produce the desired result. Not only does it make sense but indeed, it should be the norm given the current energy situation worldwide.

And so, IT, along its typical march of continuous innovation, may also have stumbled into an energy-saving contribution of its own. Cloud compute, by becoming a central compute infrastructure and storage, can help minimize energy consumption if you really think about it. In their quest to make the business more profitable, the companies in charge of it, will have to think of ways and technology that will help use just enough energy to power their grids in the likely scenario that all of them will have very little differences in what they will offer come a specific point in time. We just hope that it would be sooner than later.

Oh, and let us not forget SaaS, too. The on-demand model is largely a mental shift into buying only something that you'll use and nothing more.

So as we celebrate today, it is good to know that there is more to IT than stocks, profits and colorful ideas to help brighten the web. Hopefully, we get to see more of green, too.

You can also read my previous rant here.

Rails Caching and Morph AppSpaces @ PRUG meetup

Great meetup last Wednesday, folks! Sorry for those who had to stand, but hey, we're pretty sure you guys learned a lot. Jeff Roxas, Engineering Manager at Exist Global delivered a presentation about Rails Caching. He basically underscored the importance of caching to enable better, faster Rails applications and dove right into the different caching methods: page caching for public pages, action caching for pages for logged users, and finally fragment caching for dynamic pages (whether public or log in required). He did a few demonstrations and wrapped things up with a lively Q&A.

We managed to get Jeff to speak about Ruby on Rails, "Ruby on Rails is a very dynamic and interesting framework, it provides the developers the 'tools' that they can actually 'use' and not just talk about."

"Caching is just one example, it takes the process to a level simple to understand, but powerful to implement. Like most of the Rails tools we have today."

Up next was our very own Jerome Gotangco -- Platform & Infrastructure Manager. Jerome presented an overview of Morph Labs and a demo of how to deploy Beast onto the Morph Application Platform to the excited Ruby devs. We heard this: I finally deployed on Morph AppSpace! Another lively Q&A followed after a successful demonstration.

By the way, if you still have questions, do visit our forums here. Post a suggestion or let us know what you have in mind, and we'll get back right to you.

You'll see Jerome here with Jeff on his side.

Lastly, Jerry Rapes, General Manager of Exist Global (by the way, they co-hosted this event) gave the final remarks.

If you're interested in joining the group or the next meetups, just log onto http://groups.google.com/group/ruby-phil.

We Listen (and oh, yes we respond and act on it)

Justin Ball of Nobody Listens Anyway has posted a very interesting review of morph eXchange. His is maybe the first review of our butterfly company published in the blogosphere. To think that it all began with a simple comment I posted on his site where he wrote about cloud computing. He said he'll look into it and he delivered. You can read the complete post here.

At the end of the post, Justin wrote:

"Morph is a great service. Deployment is simple. I give them lots of points for ease of deployment. They can help you scale as they are using Amazon?s services on the back end. However, if they are going to be successful they really need to examine their bandwidth charges and become more competitive. I would like to see their website adapt a bit to make it clear that they offer scalable hosting. At first I was confused and assumed it was only a service provider - something like a hosted CMS system. Overall Morph Exchange is great, but I think they need to make a few changes to become excellent."

Ain't that a beauty? Not only does it prove we have something of value here (really) but that meaningful conversations can happen over the web and that people actually do care about it especially when it is based on respect.

Again, I would like to thank Justin for the post. But then, let me digress if you will, "we hear yah and we're listenin."

Morph, Ruby on Rails, and Amazon Web Services

The Morph Application Platform, the first Platform-as-a-Service for Ruby on Rails, leverages Amazon Web Services for the deployment and delivery of Ruby on Rails applications. The technology behind the Morph Application Platform allows us to provide developers with an elastically scalable platform to deploy their Ruby on Rails applications to while keeping expense to a minimum. While the concept of a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is something we've covered before, the latter part about Amazon often brings up a lot of questions.

Where the confusion often occurs has to do with how the Morph Application Platform interacts with Amazon Web Services and more specifically, how developers deploying to the MAP must interact with AWS. To be perfectly frank, we specifically reference Amazon because it is a well-known brand that people recognize. From a developer standpoint, however, you could deploy to the Morph Application Platform and never know that Amazon was even in the mix..

Essentially, in the truest sense of the Platform-as-a-Service philosophy, the Morph Application Platform abstracts the underlying architecture; in this case the Amazon EC2 architecture. Think of the Morph Application Platform as a "Virtualized Application Environment" where our abstraction layer is the next generation of virtualization at the infrastructure level. the MAP uses commodity software and intellectual property to build a completely seamless layer of services that product enterprise class deployment, delivery and management to applications.

What this means is that when you deploy your application to the Morph Application Platform, you do not have to make any changes to your application and you never actually work directly with EC2. In fact, you don't have to work with any of the Amazon Web Services, though you can certainly leverage S3 or SQS directly for centralized object storage and queuing respectively. The key here is that you do not have to interact with AWS if you don?t want to.

There are a number of reasons for this abstraction of the underlying technology. Other than keeping the details of what is happening under the hood away from the developer so they can focus on the core product, there is another big reason for this. Morph is not here to be a front-end for Amazon. Since we completely abstract the underlying infrastructure, we can add new grids as they come online and even spread your application across grids. We get to leverage multiple clouds for the redundancy benefits and the developer doesn't have to make any changes.

It seems a lot of the confusion about how Morph leverages EC2 or how you as a developer leveraging the Morph Application Platform works with EC2 is due to the plethora of projects, talks, and blog posts about using Ruby on Rails and EC2. Most of the articles out there talk about using Rails as a front end for deploying EC2 images, something that is completely different that running a RoR application on an EC2 instance. Here are some of the resources from around the web on using Ruby on Rails and EC2:

Libraries and Projects

• http://amazon-ec2.rubyforge.org/
• http://ec2onrails.rubyforge.org/
• http://code.google.com/p/scalr/
• http://www.elasticrails.com/

Talks and Presentations

• http://mtnwestrubyconf2008.confreaks.com/05younger.html
• http://www.slideshare.net/johnward/amazon-ec2-rails/
• http://thinedgeofthewedge.blogspot.com/2007/06/amazon-ec2-rails.html
• http://blog.marcchung.com/2008/02/ec2-at-phoenix.html

Blog posts and Articles

• http://railspikes.com/2007/4/5/rails-on-ec2
• http://pauldowman.com/projects/ruby-on-rails-ec2/
• http://www.rubyonrailscamp.com/AWS+Console
• http://niblets.wordpress.com/2007/02/12/capistrano-ec2-sitting-in-a-tree-k-i-s-s-i-n-g/
• http://www.igvita.com/2007/05/15/distributed-ruby-workers-on-ec2/
  

As you can see, even with the continuous improvement of the EC2 product, the conclusion is definitely this: It is a lot of work to leverage EC2 as a server environment for your Ruby on Rails application.

Just to put this all into perspective, EC2 has historically (since its launch just a few years ago) been used when computing power is needed on-demand. It is relatively trivial to "spin-up" instances to handle asynchronous processing, but to leverage EC2 for scalable web applications is a very different proposition. Add to that redundancy, load-balancing, databases, filesystem issues, etc. and you can see the value of a PaaS such as Morph Application Platform that leverages AWS while abstracting the underlying difficulties from the developer is necessary.

There are commercial and open source projects that provide you with a pre-configured image to place on EC2 (Linux-based system with Ruby on Rails) to run your Rails applications on the ?cloud?. Unfortunately those are still not abstracted enough from EC2 for the average Ruby on Rails developer looking for a simple deployment environment. It is our MAP technology, the "Virtualized Application Environment", that is the abstraction layer that allows developers to focus on their core product and not worry about the underlying systems and to keep costs down far below what you would pay to deploy a dedicated EC2 instance just to host your small Rails application.