ConPaaS 1.2.0

[Thorsten Schuett]

ConPaaS is the platform-as-a-service component of the Contrail project
and Scalaris has been a part of the ConPaaS distribution from the very
beginning. If you want to try out Scalaris in a managed environment
please have a look at ConPaaS.

Thorsten

The ConPaaS team is proud to announce the release of ConPaaS-1.2.0
<http://www.conpaas.eu/download/>. This release extends the previous
versions and brings a number of important new features:

* *Multi-cloud deployments:*ConPaaS can now be deployed overseveral
clouds simultaneously
<http://conpaas.readthedocs.org/en/latest/installation.html#multi-cloud-support>.
The user can choose in which cloud each virtual machine gets
deployed. This may be useful for example to deploy ConPaaS over
multiple availability zones in Amazon EC2, or to integrate resources
from a private cloud together with a public one.
* *Virtual private network support:*all communications between virtual
machines belonging to the same application may now go through a
multipoint virtual private network. This allows one to hide the
network heterogeneity between machines located in different clouds,
and to easily traverse firewalls. This feature exploits theIPOP
<http://www.grid-appliance.org/wiki/index.php/IPOP>technology.
* *Automated deployment of entire applications:*instead of deploying
multiple related ConPaaS services one by one, ConPaaS users can now
deploy entire applications in one click. All that is necessary is to
write a simple "application manifest
<http://conpaas.readthedocs.org/en/latest/manifest.html>" which
specifies the list of required services and their configuration.
ConPaaS provides a few ready-made manifests for common applications.
* *Performance monitoring:*all ConPaaS services now have the ability
to monitor their own performance using standard and service-specific
metrics.

ConPaaS is a runtime environment for hosting applications in the cloud.
It aims at offering the full power of the cloud to application
developers while shielding them from the associated complexity of the
cloud. ConPaaS is designed to host both high-performance scientific
applications and online Web applications. It automates the entire
life-cycle of an application, including collaborative development,
deployment, performance monitoring, and automatic scaling. Finally, it
runs on a variety of public and private clouds, and is easily
extensible. This allows developers to focus their attention on
application-specific concerns rather than on cloud-specific details. For
more information about the ConPaaS project as a whole we recommend
thisoverview article <http://www.globule.org/publi/CPHECA_ic2012.html>.

To try the new release the simplest option is*ConPaaS Online
<https://online.conpaas.eu/>*: new users can register and try the system
for free during a limited period.

The ConPaaS team is busier than ever in building new functionality and
in making ConPaaS an even better system. Stay tuned for the next releases!