After months under the radar, Makara on Tuesday unveiled a brand new approach to cloud computing's most difficult problem: application deployment and management. Rather than retrofit system management software designed for traditional application environments to the cloud, Makara's Cloud Application Platform leverages the virtual layer to allow developers to rapidly deploy, scale and monitor applications in cloud environments.

The product is freely available today as a developer release at www.makara.com.

"The widespread adoption of cloud computing is hitting a wall in terms of ROI because companies are not able to effectively manage applications, both inside and outside the enterprise, in a cloud environment. No one's going to run mission-critical apps without management, not in the data center and definitely not in the cloud," said Tim Guleri, Managing Director of Sierra Ventures.

"Makara's Cloud Application Platform provides that missing link, enabling developers to deploy their apps and make them work with full management capabilities. Makara will get the cloud past the ROI hurdle."

Makara provides easy on-boarding to the cloud. With Makara's Cloud Application Platform, developers are able to deploy new or existing web applications to a public or private cloud with no code changes. Makara has integrations built in for all of the components of a web application stack, and developers can choose the versions they need from a catalog. Once the application is deployed, developers have deep introspection to the application runtime and cluster-wide visibility into end user response times end-to-end through the entire stack.

Makara's Cloud Application Platform supports Java, Flex, PHP, JBoss and Tomcat applications. It runs on Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud, Terremark vCloud Express, VMware ESX, VMware Workstation, VirtualBox and Xen.

"When it comes to application management, the same rules do not apply in the cloud as they did in the data center. Developers cannot go through the painful exercise of replicating architecture and transporting it to the cloud or else they're rendering any benefits of cloud computing meaningless," said Nathan Goff, operations director of Inavero. "We need a way to help optimize applications in the cloud in order to unlock its benefits."

Makara is pioneering a new approach to application management that works as part of the underlying platform with all management and monitoring built into the virtual layer. The technology sits on top of the hypervisor and under the application stack, making it flexible and easy to port across cloud and virtual environments. With Makara, developers can easily provision across clusters or even move between cloud providers with the push of a button.

"By moving application management to the platform layer, managing applications becomes less complex and more cost-effective," said Issac Roth, CEO of Makara. "Even moving between cloud environments is easy with Makara's Cloud Application Platform because all the application code, configuration, and dependencies are stored in the Makara application capsule."