Bungee Lab's Cloud Announcements – Simplified Pricing, Virtual Appliance, and Open Sourcing

Bungee has created a virtual appliance for their Platform as a Service and also simplified their pricing scheme. Bungee’s platform starts with a web based IDE that lets you create Ajax web applications and then deploy them onto Bungee’s data center in the sky.

Pricing

Their pricing was, as they said yesterday when I talked with them, a bit complex and formula based. Now the pricing is much simpler: $0.06 per user-session hour. Developing on the Bungee platform – even doing betas – is (still) free. Once you deploy your application, they just meter usage of that application.

Virtual Appliance

The other new item is that Bungee is making their PaaS a PaaV. Ho-ho, how many of these “aaS”‘s can we come up with? More seriously, they’re now selling their stack as a virtual appliance for people who want to run all Bungee applications behind the firewall, or otherwise under their own terms. The licensing for this is $500/month. You can still develop your Bungee application in the public-web hosted Bungee web-based IDE, but come deploy time you can spit out a disk image to run where ever you like.

As part of this, Bungee is also letting you pick between deploying your application on their North American grid, their EU grid, or onto Amazon’s EC2.

Open Sourcing

More important for Bungee’s long term health is their announcement of planning to do something more open source-y with their stack. Increasingly, new development tools must be open source to get enough up-take and ongoing attention to survive. Developers, in large part, just don’t take new closed source stacks seriously. All of “the little cloud stacks” will struggle mightily if they’re closed source. With existing Ajax stacks like Ruby on Rails (RoR) and rich companies like Microsoft (Silverlight) and Adobe (Flash/Flex/AIR), the competition is stiff if you’re closed source. There’s much more nuanced discussion to have there, but I’ll leave that for another time. Appcelerator is a notable, already open source cloud stack, and Curl has danced around with open source a bit already, but still keeps it’s core asset closed.

At first glance, having talked with Bungee on the topic, it seems like they’re best bet would be to go GPL. They want to have people who modify code contribute it back, but allow people who’re just using the code “privately” (not distributing it) to keep the code.

Making Money with Detailed User Activity

Of interest to the overall cloud industry is the detailed user tracking that Bungee does. Bungee keeps and provides dashboards for all sorts of user activities that can be both used for detailed billing and management.

Companies like RedMonk client eVapt would no doubt lust over the raw usage metrics that Bungee has (and the potential for providing detailed billing and back-office support to Bungee PaaS users). Efforts to answer the question “what does IT management look like in a cloudy world” can start to get an idea of the raw data available from Bungee’s dashboards.

When and if Bungee puts an API on-top of that raw data, there should be some good material to play around with on both of those counts.

More Considerations

Bungee is still “weird” for two main reasons: they have their own programming language and their IDE is web-based. In technology innovation, new things can seem weird and then turn out to be perfectly normal, of course. Much of what we see in the cloud computing world is just like this: no relational database on Google Application Engine? Madness! ;>

What Bungee Labs, and other like WaveMaker, are offering here is something a step above a “mashup server” and just short of a traditional development stack. These stacks are above mere mashup servers as they’re intended to be programmed, if not just scripted. Mashup servers are typically targeted at point-and-click-and-drag “programming” to recombine data into new views. They’re not quite a traditional development stack because these new stacks are typically not open and general enough to allow for an extended tools ecosystem or be used for “anything.”

Nonetheless, I don’t think these “weird” things are really a problem for Bungee and others: part of their deal is to not care so much about the traditional way of making software and, instead, come up with new ways that better, cheaper, and all those other things you’d want if you were going to stop developing Java and RoR and move onto cloud programming.

Disclaimer: eVapt is a client, as are Adobe and Microsoft.

Technorati Tags: bungee, paas, cloud