tc Server Spring Edition Improves Visibility and Productivity in the Cloud

SpringSource have just announced tcServer Spring Edition, giving develpers and operators better visibility into their Spring applications deployed into cloud environments. 

tcServer, based on Tomcat is a popular choice for developers who want to take advantage of the Spring supported application server, and with this announcement, it gives a more compelling reason to use tcServer for your webapps. 

tc Server Spring Edition provides a lightweight platform for running modern applications and is ideally-suited for the virtualized datacenter as well as private and public cloud environments. The tc Server Spring Edition bridges the divide between development teams and IT operations by equipping them with tools to manage the health, performance and quality of their Spring applications.

“Not only is tc Server Spring Edition the best place to run Spring apps but it is ideally architected for next-generation data center technologies,” said Shaun Connolly, vice president of product management for the SpringSource division of VMware. “Our customers have proven that to deploy applications properly in virtual environments, the application server must require a very small footprint. In this way, tc Server Spring Edition is ideal for virtual deployments which are the onramp to cloud computing.”

tc Server continues the SpringSource vision of improving developer efficiency and guiding users across the entire application lifecycle, from development, to deployment, and on to monitoring deployed applications. This helps encourage lightweight architectures and lightweight approaches to creating applications.

The Spring Insight view gives an operational dashboard, allowing you to see the performance of your applications and spot any bottlenecks in your deployed application.

Operators also get to a view that allows them to look across their enterprise infrastructure, to see a farm of tcServers and applications in a distributed environment, through a centralised view. From here they can see the issues and they can also make performance tweaks. 

With these additions, developers and operators get top down visibility of the entire distributed environment, a view into each server and a view into each deployed application. Across the cloud, this gives you a seamless experience across the virtualized platform.

There is also application provisioning capabilities:

Finally, the template driven approach, where templates provide server instance creation really helps to get going with tc Server quickly. All of these features help development teams to get their application to the server as quickly as possible, and focus on their specific domain problems, trusting their tools and runtime to do the job correctly and quickly.

tc Server is proving itself in large corporations. NPC International, owners of the Pizza Hut franchise have been embracing Spring applications on tcServer, choosing it because of the performance and efficiency characteristics that it added to their private cloud.

“Without tc Server, I could not have deployed my web-based applications into the internal private cloud environment I created,” said Jon Brisbin, portal webmaster for NPC International. “Other solutions, including the previous application server I was using, are too process-heavy. SpringSource tc Server’s small footprint allows me to deploy a dozen app server instances on one physical box virtualized by VMware software, with plenty of capacity left over.”

 

Now, to look at the three key features announced in tc Server Spring Edition: 

Developer Efficiency: Increase productivity and decreases time to deliver applications:

• Deep visibility into the health and performance of Spring applications
• Enhanced build and deploy process through integration with Maven
• Agile Spring development experience with SpringSource Tool Suite designed to speed the code / test cycle and ability to find underperforming areas of your applications

Operational Control: Help ensure your Spring applications meet your business goals with the following features:

• Performance and SLA management of Spring applications provides the top-down insight required to help ensure applications are operating as expected
• Rich alert definition, workflows, and flexible control actions enable application operators to proactively manage application issues
• Group availability and event dashboards make it easy to see the problem areas and possible root causes of issues

 
Deployment Flexibility: Future-proof your applications by leveraging an agile platform that addresses your needs from developer to datacenter to cloud with the following features:

• Template-driven server instance creation enables multiple application server instances per machine to be configured and deployed in a matter of seconds
• Integrated experience with VMware Workstation and VMware Lab Manager enables applications to be easily deployed and debugged within encapsulated virtualized environments
• Open, secure API for all operations ensures system administrators have access to the operational capabilities they need using the scripting tools they are familiar with

Also, note that VMWare are running a Spring on VMWare promotion, providing licences for tc Server with qualifiying VMWare products.  You can find out more about tcServer at the upcoming webinar, on March 23. (European registration / US Registration) 

SpringSource tc Server 2.0 will be generally available in early April 2010 and offered at list price in the following three packages:

• Spring Edition – Starts at $750 per CPU
• Standard Edition – Starts at $500 CPU
• Developer Edition – Free to download standalone or as part of SpringSource Tool Suite