Standing Cloud is a leading provider of cloud application management services. We deliver a ready-built application marketplace and management platform for cloud service providers, ISVs, and other technology solution providers, making application deployment, management and distribution fast, simple and hassle-free for their customers.

Founded in 2009, our world-class investors include:

Avalon Ventures is a San Diego and Boston venture capital fund focused on seed and early stage companies in the wireless technology, life science industries and Web 3.0 enabled value added services.

Foundry Group is a venture capital firm focused on making investments in early-stage information technology, Internet and software startups. Our passion is working alongside entrepreneurs to give birth to new technologies and to build those technologies into industry-leading companies. We're centrally located in Boulder, Colorado, but we invest in companies across North America.

The quick answer is that using fully configured boot images, like those available from Amazon and others, is a legacy technique and isn't best practice for cloud or other deployments.

First, keep in mind that we do use boot images — there's no other way to start a virtual machine. However, instead of booting from an image that already has the technology stack configured and the application installed, we begin with an image that is just the base operating system, for many reasons. Here are a few:

When it comes to application upgrades, Standing Cloud hosting clients enjoy a unique combination of ease and full control. For any type of upgrade, you have the option of automatic or manual upgrades. For the operating system and technology stack (e.g., database or web server) upgrades, we simply back up and restore your application — our system is designed so that the application is fully portable with respect to changes of this kind.

Binary application images (like those from Bitnami, Jumpbox, etc) contain the entire contents of a server with an application installed on it. It's as though you've had an expert system administrator set up the server and install the technology stack and application, and then capture that exact configuration so that you can reproduce it yourself in a physical or virtual server. A simple form allows you to do some basic configuration of the application before it starts up. They're by definition specific to a target environment (e.g., VMWare, or Amazon EC2).

You might want to consider using Standing Cloud if you’d like to take advantage of the management and monitoring features we offer in addition to the “core” cloud capabilities you already have. Check out a full list of our capabilities.