Maureen O'Gara

Java players Azul and CumuLogic have teamed up to create what they say is the first integrated, truly elastic PaaS-enablement platform by combining CumuLogic's Java-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) with Azul's memory-elastic Zing runtime (i.e. Java Virtual Machine).

The move is supposed to make life more worth living for Java developers trying to get to the cloud who find PaaS environments a hassle or whose mission-critical apps wind up TCO-challenged SLA defects despite JVM tuning and complex provisioning schemes. (Sound familiar?)

Azul CEO Scott Sellers says CumuLogic focuses on the operations side, making apps reliant, managed, monitored and metered, and Azul's widgetry ensures mission-critical workloads perform even in the multi-tenant environments that can be a sticking point.

The level of efficiency imparted to Java apps in the cloud by the combined mojo is supposed to be "dramatic."

Scott says he fancies the up-and-coming CumuLogic because - unlike, say, Salesforce.com, granted, an extreme example that even requires its own language be used - it's free of any vendor lock-in, agnostic about the IaaS, and doesn't mean apps have to be rewritten.

By leveraging Azul's real-time, resource-elastic Zing JVM in CumuLogic's platform, he says, enterprises, ISVs and PaaS providers can deploy Java-based applications in the cloud with guaranteed performance and response time consistency.

With Zing's memory elasticity, any multi-tenant application instance can dynamically grow in real-time to meet the performance needs of all tenants. This elasticity at the Java layer ensures maximum operational and resource efficiency, and eliminates the need for expensive custom isolation.

See, for maximum operational efficiency in multi-tenant environments, where a single tenant can usurp all the available resources of a given application instance, PaaS-enablement platforms have to be elastic and accommodate tenants of all size and workload demands.

"Our vision is to deliver a cloud platform that enables customers to deploy production applications in the cloud," CumuLogic CEO Mike Soby said in a statement. "By teaming with Azul Systems we are able to offer a high-performance Java runtime, which is a key requirement in industries such as financial services, where customers can benefit immensely from Zing's elastic memory, pause-less operation, and zero-overhead monitoring"

The widgetry - good for building, testing, quickly deploying and managing Java-based Linux solutions on private, public or hybrid clouds - targets enterprises, ISVs and cloud providers.

Oh, by the way, Azul is supposed to put out Zing 5.5 next week and plug Java memory leaks.