Cloud management app Nubefy enters private beta

Nubefy announced last week the launch of its private beta where a select group of partners and customers will be invited to try Nubefy out and provide feedback. This enables the startup to refine and improve their product offering to the public. The public can also try to get in the beta by signing up for a Nubefy account at www.nubefy.com.

What exactly is Nubefy?

Nubefy is a cloud based service that enables companies to easily manage their cloud based servers from among multiple providers like Amazon EC2, IBM, Joyent, Softlayer, Microsoft’s Azure, RackSpace and a host of other public cloud providers.

Nubefy provides several advantages to companies migrating to cloud based providers.

1. It is easier to use: A single, unified web-based console that shortens users’ learning curve in managing all their hosted services hosted at multiple providers. No need to learn multiple hosting methods to work with multiple providers. You just need Nubefy to do it all for you.
2. Faster deployment: Nubefy’s pre-built templates help you to deploy the same configuration across several cloud hosting providers.
3. Easier Administration: The central console lets you see key metrics and events from a single location so you don’t have to login to multiple providers to get the data. The use of nScripts simplifies remote management and configuration tasks.
4. No Vendor Lockdowns: This system help users to easily migrate from one provider to another. Users can thus avoid being ‘locked’ down to any single cloud provider. Since builds are going to be standard, bandwidth is saved by avoiding the transfer of the build, only the changed data gets sent across the wire.

Eric Meyer, CEO of Nubefy, showed me the entire process as diagrammed below. In about 10 minutes, Nubefy was able to provision a Linux Build in Amazon from a prebuilt template. I did not even have to consult the Amazon User manual.

I could even select where in the world the build should be hosted in.

Once the build was ‘deployed’ in Amazon, Eric showed me the SSH (Secure Shell) or Terminal Services that could be used to manage the hosted server (SSH and Terminal Services are industry standard methods for users to manage and configure their servers).

There were also easy buttons that could be used to create backups, clone (make duplicates) builds and monitor server events. Applications like Drupal, Joomla, Mysql, Sugarcrm and WordPress (among a host of others) can be easily deployed from inside Nubefy.

Since it is still in early beta, there are some features and capabilities that are still ‘under construction” at this time:

• Nubefy does not support private cloud systems like those from VMWare, Virtuozzo and Microsoft’s HyperV.
• The Control component does not yet support load balancing across the cloud and portability or replication of configuration.
• Nubefy can not yet provision Windows-based servers in the cloud providers ( Eric did assure that this will be available in private beta by October 2012).

Despite these temporary limitations, the impressive demo clearly showed that Nubefy was changing the rules of the cloud hosting game. By making cloud provisioning and management easier with the introduction of a comprehensive cloud enablement toolbox, Nubefy is now “shifting the balance of purchasing power to line-of-business leaders away from IT.” This may have important implications on how Nubefy (the company) should target its market and craft its message.

How big is the Cloud Infrastructure service market?

IDC’s updated forecast shows rapid growth of over 90% in 2011 and a 2010–2015 Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 46.4%. Meanwhile, Gartner projects a 41.7% CAGR to around US$24.4B by 2016.

Nubefy is still working on its business model

Nubefy will have to grapple with whether to charge on a per server or per hour usage. It’ll also have to decide whether to adopt a freemium model, which might be effective in engaging early adopters to spread the word and “cross the chasm” towards rapid mass adoption. At the same time, the freemium model enables price discrimination strategies that leads to revenue from the acquisition and retention of premium users.

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