Continuuity, a provider of unified experience across the entire application lifecycle from development to DevOps, has just launched the industry’s first Big Data application fabric, the Continuuity Big Data AppFabricTM that will revolutionize the developer experience, enabling any developer to quickly and easily build big data apps.Delivered as a Big Data application Platform as a Service, the Continuuity Big Data AppFabric comes packaged in three flavors – Single-node Edition, Private Cloud Edition and Public Cloud Edition.

“Until now, the barrier to building Big Data applications was insanely high. With the launch of Continuuity, we’re democratizing Big Data application development and making the developer’s life better across the entire application development lifecycle. Our platform will unleash a huge wave of developers building Big Data apps,” said Todd Papaioannou, co-founder and CEO of Continuuity. “We focus on developers because we are developers. Our team has built parallel databases, as well as Big Data infrastructures and applications, and we’ve been working on open source projects like Hadoop and Hbase for years. We’re thrilled to be the first to market with the cloud-based platform that will enable developers to quickly and easily turn their big ideas into Big Data apps.

With its new offering, Continuuity has simplified the entire Big Data application development lifecycle. In addition, it has added visually rich UIs, simple APIs, push-button deployment from the developer’s local machine to the cloud and dynamic scalability to meet application demands. It is aimed at easing the process of deploying, developing and scaling applications, AppFabric is available as a hosted cloud platform or can be integrated with an existing Hadoop/HBase installation.

“So far Big Data has been a data play. But as Big Data becomes more operational, there will be the need to have a repeatable model for developing applications that run against it,” said Tony Baer, principal analyst at Ovum. “Continuuity’s Big Data application fabric makes the middle tier relevant to Big Data. It applies the same principles that allowed Java developers to scale enterprise applications to the multi-tiered, highly distributed environment of the Web. It allows Java developers to do what they do best – build repeatable applications that allow enterprises to incorporate Big Data into their operations.”

Besides, Continuuity Developer Suite consists of a free, downloadable, fully featured single node edition of the Continuuity AppFabric and a Software Development Kit. This SDK makes creating Big Data applications blazing fast with higher level APIs, libraries that enable developers to easily model and manipulate common data patterns, tooling, tutorials and documentation.

Bringing DevOps Out of the Depths of Big Data

DevOpsANGLE editor Kyt Dotson recently spoke with CEO Todd Papaioannou about Continuuity’s appearance from stealth mode at StataConf. And from that presentation, it’s obvious that it’s about time that Big Data saw a product that can democratize Big Data application development.

Right now, most Big Data applications settle on a great deal of expertise—not just their architecture and design that take the attentions of data scientists—the result is that Big Data remains in its infancy of adoption because the confluence of architecture, hardware, and software requires a great deal of cost and time.

Continuuity’s application fabric stands to change that by abstracting the lower levels and permitting developers the chance to build Big Data applications on a foundation, without having to build the foundation. Papiaoannou explained that it’s all about tearing down barriers.

“With executives who worked with Hadoop and HBase to make highly parallel platforms, who played long and hard with companies deep in the cloud (such as Facebook and Yahoo!) this company comes from a good place,” says Dotson. “The addition of Continuuity to the market should change the development landscape from across Big Data and through the cloud. Let those barriers crumble and the Big Data renaissance may be closer than any of us expect.”

Contributing authors: Isha Suri and Kyt Dotson