Application deployment model: in depth

It takes complex technology to make cloud application deployment simple, no matter what application or cloud you choose. Standing Cloud's Platform as a Service (PaaS) system standardizes and streamlines the processes of initializing and configuring cloud servers. Our technology helps you quickly deploy your chosen application with full portability to other servers and clouds.

We start with a clean server image from the cloud provider of your choice. Once the server is active, we run a series of scripts that get the server ready to host one of our 90+ supported applications and platforms. The steps are different depending on which stack the application requires.

Standing Cloud uses the distribution's included versions of Apache, PHP, and MySQL, obtained through an application package manager like Yum. For example, our LAMP application installation performs installations of Apache, PHP, MySQL, and any supporting software that are needed for the application. We then mathematically apply some configuration tweaks to Apache, PHP, and in some cases MySQL based on the size of the server that was allocated.

Beyond Application Images

In contrast to standard deployment using application images, all of our server and app configuration steps are done on the deployment server directly — we don't stage anything ahead of time. This means that any configuration changes you make through our interface are done directly to the server; Standing Cloud will back up and restore them without any issues.

If you make manual changes to any of the configuration files, however, we lose those changes if you shutdown and restore to a cloud provider that uses a different distribution than what you were on previously. In the near future, the system will maintain all of the AMP software in a common location regardless of distribution, so your changes will be maintained, and cross-cloud migration will be completely transparent.

We've also standardized a common location for maintaining all of the application's code. Within that main directory, there are several directories including htdocs/ (docroot for the web server) and conf/ (the configuration directory where Apache get its virtual host information). For most applications, especially LAMP apps, the docroot contains all of the code for the application, and any changes made here will be backed up by our system and can be restored across any of the cloud providers.

For more information or to ask further technical questions about our system, visit our forum or contact us.