I first met Daniel O’Prey, CEO and founder of MadeiraCloud, when I was working with Innovation Works’ startup XingCloud last year, and kept in touch after moving back to Singapore. It’s awesome to know that the Beijing startup has been doing pretty well, placing fifth in the recent ChinaBang LaunchPad competition.
MadeiraCloud is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) venture and has a great concept of managing your cloud architecture the way you design it – diagrammatically. In a nutshell, Madeira is a set of web app tools built on top of Amazon’s AWS to help users design, build, and manage their application, making the cloud easier and more efficient to use. It could be particularly useful for fellow startups.
You can use MadeiraCloud’s WYSIWYG editor to drag and drop your cloud resources onto a canvas and connect them. While users focus on the architecture of their work, Madeira will bootstrap the servers, mount additional storage, deploy code, and setup the connections.
In addition, Dan tells me, it provides an architectural-level view of your applications, displaying individual component’s state, load, performance, and alerts, as well as the correlations among errors and performance deterioration. It is very useful for cause diagnosis and availability enhancement, since it will record and replay how failures spread through your system.
MadeiraCloud also allows you to save your composition (or what we usually call, an “app”) as a stack template for future use. Users can quickly provision identical replicas of their applications for development, testing, training, and demos in minutes, on-demand with AWS.
In recent weeks, MadeiraCloud has also released three new features. One, intelligent network management, where it dynamically resolves for new IP addresses when users launch several apps from the same stack set of resources, so users do not have to lift a finger to change anything. Two, it will help save running apps back to stacks, so you can relaunch this stack back into an app multiple times, and have multiple, identical, and conflict-free copies of your application ready when you need them. Three, you can also make identical clones of apps, where you can create an identical copy in just a couple of clicks and minutes, with all the repetitive work done on its backend.
Dan also shared that they will be releasing support for Eucalyptus and OpenStack in the near future. If you guys are keen to try out the services, you can request a MadeiraCloud invite here.