GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform (XAP) provides a complete suite of virtualized middleware and a standards-based runtime environment for applications running on popular cloud infrastructure services (IaaS). XAP allows you to deploy your existing applications on the cloud and get them running immediately, with no additional development or integration.

GigaSpaces provides full integration and cloud tools for Amazon EC2, and has partnered with additional cloud vendors including RightScale, GoGrid, Joyent, Flexiscale, and CohesiveFT, with full XAP integration coming soon. On all these clouds, XAP is offered as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) with a pay-per-use licensing model, paid in addition to the fees charged by the cloud vendors for the infrastructure.

Further down this page: XAP Cloud Platform Features | Five Unique Benefits

Torn Between IaaS and PaaS?

Today there are two primary types of cloud service offerings:

• Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (=IaaS, e.g. Amazon EC2) - these services provide only the underlying computing power and cloud infrastructure, and in some cases, also a means for storing and managing application data. IaaS gives you great flexibility for developing custom applications using any technology - but IaaS clouds don't provide most of the basic platform capabilities like middleware, integration and scalability.

• Platform as a Service Cloud (=PaaS, e.g. Google App Engine) – provides both the infrastructure services, and an application platform which provides a runtime environment (like a traditional application server), a development environment, and takes care of deployment and scalability. PaaS provides everything ready out of the box, including platform capabilities - but PaaS clouds don't support standard frameworks like J2EE and .NET, and are in general very limiting in the technologies they support.

GigaSpaces XAP Gives You the Best of Both Worlds!

• XAP provides all the platform capabilities of the best PaaS vendors (like Force.com and Google App Engine), and much more – see XAP Cloud Platform Features below.

• XAP works with all the major IaaS vendors, so you can benefit from their infrastructure without having to develop platform capabilities yourself.

• XAP supports standard frameworks like J2EE, .NET and Spring, and permits all popular programming languages and technologies.

• XAP allows you to easily port your applications between private and public clouds, preventing vendor lock-in and allowing you to run the same applications on the cloud and on-premise.

XAP Cloud Platform Features

XAP, when used as a platform on top of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings such as Amazon EC2, provides the following powerful capabilities:

• Support for standard frameworks and popular technologies including J2EE, .NET, Spring, C++, and dynamic languages.

• One-click deployment of full-blown applications – XAP automatically deploys your applications on the cloud.

• Auto application scaling – XAP automatically scales out your application - including the load balancer and web container - according to real-time application loads.

• Database scaling – XAP gives you an In-Memory Data Grid that makes your data scalable and highly reliable, with no contention and no bottlenecks.

• Self-healing – XAP automatically recovers application instances from backup, and raises a new backup instance.

• Virtual private clouds – XAP allows you to run multiple applications on the same cloud account, with full isolation between them.

• Cloud tools – XAP provides a full set of tools for managing and deploying applications on the cloud.

• Load balancing – XAP transparently load-balances customer requests between multiple instances of your application.

• Support for parallel processing and Map/Reduce for data-intensive and compute-intensive applications.

Why Choose XAP? Five Unique Benefits

Today’s applications weren't built with the cloud in mind – for example, many are built on the N-Tier model which is inherently non-scalable – and this means they cannot fully enjoy the benefits of the new virtualized environment. XAP provides five unique benefits which allow you to get more out of the cloud:

1. Makes the applications and middleware more efficient, meaning you can meet the same service levels with smaller servers and less CPU hours.

2. Offers all-in-one, pay-per-use pricing, allowing you to pay one time for the entire platform, according to your actual usage.

3. Provides seamless cloud portability, so you can very easily move applications from an in-house data center to a cloud, or from one cloud vendor to another.

4. Peak loads economy (cloud spillover) – your in-house applications' workload can spill over to the cloud during peak load times.

5. Brings the value of the cloud to all production systems – XAP can meet the most demanding performance and reliability requirements within the cloud environment.

This means you can offer better and more reliable service to your users, and save big bucks – with XAP you can meet your service levels with much less resources, which means a much smaller cloud services bill.