Skydera C3 Developer Edition Populates The Cloud With Self-Service Solutions

Platform-as-a-service provider Skydera has released its Skydera C3 Developer Edition, a cross-cloud platform designed to help cloud developers build apps across multiple hosting ecosystems.

"C3 serves as an alternative to the management consoles of specific hosting providers," says Lecole Cole, founder and CEO of Skydera. "It automates many of the functions that previously needed hands-on IT support."

Skydera C3 is designed to facilitate developer self-service, letting enterprises and software developers build, deploy and manage the end-to-end lifecycle of cloud applications through one dashboard and self-service portal—providing scalability and flexibility, and helping address the risk of vendor lock-in.

It is that one-dashboard approach that brings simplicity to cross-cloud platform management. In other words, IT developers can combine elements from multiple cloud services into what appears to be a singular offering--exemplifying the concept of a private cloud built from public cloud services.

For those looking to dive into the cloud, but have been limited by the design and offerings of specific hosts, C3 allows developers to select what cloud services work best and integrate them together in a fashion that best suit customers' needs.

The new edition of the platform is being offered as a free trial for developers building apps in the Amazon, Rackspace and GoGrid ecosystems, as well as supporting OpenStack and Eucalyptus. Future versions of the platform will add more hosting providers, more automated support and an app store of available add-ins, according to the company.

Ideally, developers will be able to use C3 to create custom cloud platforms that reside on private clouds hosted at remote service providers, giving the ability to leverage large host capabilities, yet keep platforms segregated for private environments, and even combine elements from multiple hosts into a private, unified cloud offering.

"Developers do not want to be locked in to any specific hosting ecosystem, and want the widest choice in development options and price," Cole says. "C3 solves that problem and makes seamless migration between cloud providers easy. It's designed for the evolution of the cloud landscape, in which cross-cloud development is a business necessity. It also enables easy cost estimates of various cloud environments."

Some of the key features of Skydera C3 include consolidated user provisioning, application deployment, cross platform monitoring and library management. Simply put, Skydera C3 offers all of the management and deployment options found under a single-cloud services provider, but it works across multiple providers, creating a unified management paradigm for what would normally be disparate systems.

C3’s integrated dashboard offers drag-and-drop simplicity, with a single-pane-of-glass view into the various components of a cloud offering--including available services, storage pools, availability, health statuses and connections. What’s more, the dashboard offers pull-downs and tabs to quickly switch among service providers, execute analytical functions and generate reports.

Controls and actions are roles-based, allowing IT managers to filter who can do what and control access to more critical components of the dashboard. Currently, Skydera C3 is available under a "free” tier" for small and midsize business users. The company is developing other "tiers" that will have varying pricing levels. (Pricing has not been announced.)

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