Appcito, a cloud application delivery company, today launched its cloud-native Cloud Application Front End (CAFE) service, which unifies all the application delivery services—including load balancing, application security, continuous deployment, performance optimization, and application analytics and insights—needed for delivering both traditional and micro services-based applications. Purpose-built for the cloud and for today’s agile application operations teams, the CAFE software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering is designed for AWS, OpenStack, VMware, Microsoft Azure and other public, private and hybrid clouds.

Located strategically close to applications inside cloud data centers, Appcito CAFE accelerates and simplifies application delivery. In less than five minutes, DevOps and enterprise IT teams can configure application delivery services that ensure enterprise applications and micro services are fast, secure, reliable and elastic. CAFE also leverages big data analytics and real-time insights for unprecedented application visibility, as well as the ability to optimally tune application behavior through dynamic policy management of application services.

“Appcito’s CAFE service puts the power of the cloud within reach of any enterprise, so they can enjoy business advantages previously available only to a handful of the largest, most deep-pocketed cloud enterprises,” said Kamal Anand, CEO of Appcito. “Our approach—delivering critical application infrastructure functionality in a unified, cloud-native and easy-to-consume fashion—is the first to address all the needs of modern application delivery. We empower application teams, while freeing scarce DevOps resources to focus on building core business functionality rather than managing a hodge-podge of infrastructure services. The result is dramatically enhanced DevOps agility and productivity, plus delighted end users.”

A New Approach to a Growing Market

Appcito participates in a growing market that exists to help enterprises grapple with accelerating complexity—in their types of applications, modes of application delivery and consumption models—along with cloud, virtualization, mobility, software-defined networking (SDN) and other technologies.

The market for addressing these needs, broadly defined as the application services market, is expected to be worth over $6 billion in 2015, according to estimates by industry analysts. It encompasses products and approaches such as traditional load balancers and application delivery controllers, as well as software appliances and open-source tools providing single-point solutions for security, performance optimization or load balancing.

Appcito is the first to take a unified, integrated, cloud-native approach to the application delivery market, and to offer a subscription-based SaaS business model. As a result, Appcito provides not only the same features as found in legacy and open-source solutions, but also additional capabilities required for agility and the elastic nature of modern application infrastructures.

According to Gartner: “We are observing the early emergence of Application Delivery Controller capabilities being extended via a cloud-based as-a-service offering. Gartner anticipates this trend to be of increasing importance as the Application Delivery Controller market evolves to serve application traffic patterns that do not follow traditional hub-and spoke/data-center-centric models.”*

“The Appcito CAFE service makes it dramatically simpler for application operations teams to deploy and operate cloud applications that are fast, reliable and secure,” said Janakiram MSV, senior analyst for Gigaom Research. “Alternative approaches use a ‘spaghetti’ of point solutions that are not cloud-native, that are complex to integrate and operate, and that can introduce multiple points of failure. With its solution, Appcito enables enterprises to further realize the agility and cost benefits of moving to the cloud.”

“Appcito is addressing vital problems faced by organizations operating their applications on the cloud,” said Harish Ganesan, CTO of 8K Miles, a global cloud and security solutions company. “Appcito has identified and effectively solved a major gap faced by IT and application teams on the cloud. Appcito's offering will enable application teams to easily scale and load balance their applications with enhanced availability, visibility, performance and security.”

Multi-cloud Appcito Service Delivers Powerful Benefits, Easily

The CAFE service, available initially for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and OpenStack-based clouds, is designed to work across any public cloud (e.g., Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM SoftLayer), private cloud (e.g., based on VMware) and hybrid cloud environments.

The Appcito CAFE service can be activated in minutes and includes unified functionality in the areas of:

• Availability: Advanced elastic load balancing and content switching, with built-in analytics and feedback capabilities to maintain high availability of applications
• Performance: End-user performance optimization, especially for mobile devices
• Security: Web Application Firewall, distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection and elastic SSL
• Continuous deployment: Automated policy-driven traffic steering and traffic analytics for smooth code upgrades; request mirroring between production and Dev/Test
• Insights: Application analytics and insights for optimizing performance, security, costs and deployment effectiveness; the ability to continuously improve applications based on insights and learning

Application owners, who are responsible for maintaining the enterprise’s portfolio of existing applications and building new applications, can expect the Appcito CAFE service to deliver:

• A more responsive and rewarding end-user experience
• Greater agility for an increased competitive advantage
• Lower costs and a subscription-based model in line with their application usage

Application operations teams (DevOps), who are responsible for the deployment and operations of applications, can expect the Appcito CAFE service to deliver:

• Reduced performance and security risk
• Real-time insights into application performance and availability
• Increased efficiency of test and continuous deployment processes

Price and Availability

The Appcito CAFE service is available now for AWS and OpenStack cloud environments. Appcito offers a 30-day free trial of CAFE. Subscriptions are available at three levels—Starter, Business and Enterprise—with rates beginning at $50 per application per month for the Starter level. Details are available at www.appcito.com/appcito-cafe/plans/.