San Francisco startup Elastra seeks to "unlock the value of the cloud" with a new service that lets companies quickly create database applications on utility computing platforms like Amazon Web Services (AMZN). The company says its Elastra Cloud Server offers a simpler way to deploy applications on Amazon's infrastructure, providing customers with two markup languages that can be used to create database-driven services. The Cloud Server uses a metered, pay-per-use software pricing model, and will be available in April.
Elastra is designed to make could cloud computing more accessible for small to medium-sized businesses that want to leverage Amazon's platform but lack the in-house expertise to easily build database applications atop EC2 and S3. The company says the Cloud Server can provide "infinitely scalable, on-demand RDBMS (relational database management software) technology." Dana Gardner at ZDNet said Elastra can provide onramps to cloud computing capabilities:
I suppose we can coin this as "middleware for cloud computing," or maybe "APIs for cloud computing." In any event, let's hope these onramps become highly visual, automated and increasing based on widely accepted standards.
"We wanted to pick up where utility computing left off
