App Platform for Future: BungeeLabs + Nirvanix + (webDB)

By Vivek | September 6th, 2007 at 02:42 pm ET         

Pieces of the webservices enabled application development and deployment platform are finally falling into place. Although the process was kicked off by Amazon AWS around 2 years back, few of the startups are taking the lead in freeing startups from buying hardware or building infrastructure silos.

Earlier this year, Utah based BungeeLabs(review) went into private beta with it’s web-based application development platform. BungeeLabs enables real easy creation of web apps that is bound to catch developer attention when it goes live in the near future. I would say, expect more developer interest in BungeeLabs then what RoR ever got.

Since Bungee delivers web apps, this goes against the game plan of those people busy making fuss about Silverlight and Adobe AIR. The fact of web life is that users want to use the browser and they are really not that unsatisfied with it. Especially when you offer them a scenario where they are forced migrate to another platform altogether and 99% of their apps get left back in process.

Anyway, what Bungee needs to become THE development platform and also free developers of infrastructure nightmares is webservices enabled storage and database. Amazon S3 was and still is a good option for the first part. But the lack of SLAs and paid Technical Support for S3 leaves the more adventurous kinds to use it for Production apps. San Diego based startup Nirvanix recognized this opportunity last year and started working on a similar service that not only takes out all the pain points but also adds much more for a bit of a higher price.

Launched yesterday, Nirvanix’s storage-as-a-service enables REST and SOAP based access to storage. With high focus on media companies, Nirvanix also handles media processing calls to enable image resize/rotate and soon video/audio transcoding, direct HTTP upload of content to Nirvanix servers, scalable filesystem, and dynamic load balancing. Try handling all this yourself, I bet you might double the size of your tiny startup team.

Best part of the service is the pricing - $0.18/GB/month of storage and $.18/GB of bandwidth consumed. Pricing includes basic support and a guaranteed SLA of 99.9% uptime and availability. Last part is something that Amazon never seems to deliver on.

Coming back to the initial discuss, we go the app platform Bungee and storage Nirvanix. So what we really really need is a transaction REST and/or SOAP enabled database. Once you have that in your hands, all you might require is a single dual Xeon for custom scripts that updates user profiles and newsfeeds on Facebook . Now the question is - Who is going to deliver this high performing webservices enabled DB? I have heard about at least one company(not startup) working on that, but no confirmations till now. Hence no names to give out. But the point is, there is a real opportunity out there for a team to build on.