Currently, only about five percent of all enterprises, service providers and independent software vendors have been able to migrate their legacy applications into the cloud. There are obvious advantages to this approach; one of these is the fact that once legacy apps are in the cloud, they can be leveraged for multiple services by abstracting their different pieces. In order to enable easy on-boarding of business-critical apps to any cloud, GigaSpaces is partnering with OpsCode to make this happen.

The partnership will bring to the table OpsCode’s Chef open-source systems integration framework, while GigaSpaces (News - Alert) will offer its Cloudify recipe-based model to help move any new and existing apps to the cloud. OpsCode Chef will automate the cloud while Cloudify will enable massive apps migrations together with support for big data technologies such as Hadoop, Cassandra and MongoDB.

As many companies look to big data to help them gain business intelligence in various verticals of their operations, Cloudify is specifically developed to support big data applications management and portability within the cloud. This will mean reducing operational and infrastructure costs required to run these systems.

OpsCode uses a software development method called DevOps and the concept of recipes to offer on-going management which, goes beyond setup and includes monitoring, high availability maintenance and auto-scaling of the various applications. Chef offers configuration management and service-oriented architectures, providing a fully-automated infrastructure. 

The partnership also gave birth to Cloudify 2.3, which now comes with improved cloud template administration, configurable deployments and multi-tenant security. It also includes complete application-level orchestration, deployment and management. It will also be possible for customers to use non-virtualized environments or their own set of servers as “clouds,” and it will support popular cloud infrastructures like OpenStack, RackSpace, Windows Azure, Apache CloudStack, vCloud and Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) (AWS).

These major developments are a sign of the growing willingness and enthusiasm of cloud support for existing applications, and will no doubt be good news for cloud service providers and supporters.

Want to learn more about cloud computing solutions geared specifically towards small to medium-sized businesses?  Don’t miss the Cloud4SMB Expo, collocated with ITEXPO Miami 2013, Jan 29- Feb. 1 in Miami, Florida.  Stay in touch with everything happening at Cloud4SMB Expo. Follow us on Twitter.