RightScale Cloud Computing Management Platform

RightScale Cloud Computing Management Platform

RightScale helped us scale from 40 servers to 4,000 servers in only 3 days! Without EC2 and RightScale, it would have been impossible to meet our processing requirements.
--Steve Clifton, CTO, Animoto.com

RightScale's main offering is an automated cloud computing management system that helps companies create scalable web applications running on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Through its platform and consulting services it "enables companies to create scalable web solutions running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) that are reliable, easy to manage, and cost less."

RightScale lists their advantages as:

* Cloud-Ready ServerTemplates – pre-packaged best-practice ServerTemplates for common cloud application scenarios built with reliability, resiliency, and performance.
* Managing Deployments – Manage groups of servers architected to work together over their lifecycle – saving systems administrative time and reducing errors. Includes autoscaling, remediation, and automatic configuration.
* Transparency and Control – Open architecture, to retain visibility into all levels of your cloud application. Manage, monitor, test, troubleshoot, and re-launch applications. Provides an operations runbook.

So far so good, then RightScale marketing goes over the top with this puzzler...

* Eliminate Lock-in with Cloud Portability – Gain the freedom and flexibility to choose among a variety of development languages, software stacks, data stores, and cloud providers. Choose the right cloud infrastructure for your unique requirements, whether that involves security and regulatory compliance, geographic location, special features, or pricing. Manage and migrate deployments across clouds – public or private. With RightScale, you never get locked in.

Hmm... Don't they only work with Amazon EC2? Well there was this press release indicating Sept 2009 alpha support for Rackspace and other providers. We wonder if they will be able to stay cloud-neutral or will be acquired.

Here are links to features and pricing.