A few days ago Bungee Labs officially opened their Platform As A Service (PAAS), called Bungee Connect, to all developers as a public beta. Here's the link: www.bungeelabs.com.
We've had the pleasure of working with the Bungee Labs folks to test drive our own Rhapsody Web Services, and we have been universally impressed with their offering. While much has been written about their launch, I thought I'd take a few moments to highlight some of the good press they've received, and discuss how I feel the Bungee "cloud" analogy relates to the Rhapsody "cloud" analogy.
First off, a little about Bungee. Bungee Connect is a platform for developing feature rich desktop like web applications. The applications are created, tested, deployed, and hosted all within the Bungee environment. A user need not install a modicum of client side software to get up an running. Even their integrated developer environment is web based. The service fees are utility based, with creation of an account free of charge during the public beta.
Here are some write-ups about the Bungee Connect PAAS which will summarize and detail their service far better than I can:
We have been working with Bungee for a while now. During the build out of their service they wanted to test against various real world production ready Web Services. We were thrilled when they approached us about working with them to display the opportunities that could be created when using the Bungee and Rhapsody clouds together. Here's a link to a video created by Bungee showing how a developer can quickly make a sample Rhapsody Web Services powered application using Bungee Connect. This example is utilizing several of our technologies, including: the simple.js player, rss feeds, and some Rhapsody Direct SOAP api's.
What I find interesting about the Bungee launch are the many references to the Bungee "cloud". Generally, this refers to the entire Bungee environment as listed above, with the point being that a user need not worry about the mystery within the cloud, they are simply cognizant that it's there and that it works.
Here at Rhapsody, we often find ourselves diagramming the Rhapsody "cloud" on whiteboards. This ubiquitous amorphism represents, to us, the entire reason why Rhapsody exists; to take the hardship of out of finding, sorting, categorizing, rating, and discovering music. I have over 500 CD's sitting untouched on a shelf in my house. Once upon a time, I would spend countless hours ripping, burning, sorting (both digitally and on the shelf), and editing metadata for these CD's. These tasks are now rendered completely obsolete thanks to Rhapsody. On top of these time savings, Rhapsody finds me new music to listen to and serves as an erudite encyclopedia of music knowledge(I no longer need to purchase a music guide every year).
Similarly, Bungee Labs claims that using their cloud will vastly decrease time to market (by as much as 80%). As an example, they built this sample application in just 13 weeks. No longer will QA need to ping ops to get a new release out to integration. No longer will build configuration issues pop up when placing a new build on load. Need a bug fixed? Make the change and test, no waiting on builds and deployment. Need new servers due to the wild success of your amazing web application, no problem, your fees simply go up to compensate for your traffic. Efficiency begets speed (and lower costs).
At least that's the idea. From our experience integrating Rhapsody Web Services with Bungee Connect, I think they are onto something.
-- Josh
