At the last leg of TIBCO Now in San Diego, TIBCO revealed our  new integration flavor – TIBCO BusinessWorks Container Edition and Plugins for AWS Marketplace

There were some really good questions at the Solutions Showcase in which a lot was discussed around this. So you might be thinking yet another flavor of BusinessWorks? Which one is the right fit for me? In this post, I’ll try to shed some light on what this new launch is and how you can use it today in your cloud enablement strategy.

Before we start discussing the product itself let’s talk a bit about the Why – Why another offering

If we look at the promise of the cloud, one of the biggest advantages of using the cloud is the elasticity it provides. In simple terms, this means you do not need to procure hardware to scale your applications when you need better performance or need to add additional load to your setup. In addition to worrying about scaling your hardware, you also need to size your applications deployments so that you can procure additional software licenses to legally run your software at peak load. The problem here was users tend to procure both hardware and software based on what they foresee as peak load and not what is the average running load. The cloud helped solve the hardware problem. You could now move your entire deployment to the cloud and add and remove compute capacity dynamically providing customers a new more cost-effective way of managing their deployments. While this solved the hardware problem, the software problem lingered on.

When TIBCO released BusinessWorks Container Edition, we provided a way to deploy Applications to the cloud using containers. The tight integration with PAAS providers like CloudFoundry and Kubernetes made us like any other container you would deploy natively in these PAAS environments.

By putting BWCE on the AWS Marketplace I think, we have taken a step towards solving the software issue. Not only have we solved the elastic licensing problem by purchasing software quicker through AWS Marketplace but also revolutionized the unit of billing. Using the Marketplace edition, users can be billed per container per hour. I believe this is a fundamental requirement in the cloud story of adding elastic compute capacity. Users can now decide which services need to be scaled and pay as you go. This fits tightly with the cloud promise of paying on usage.

Not only does this offering allow you to be billed based on usage, it also bootstraps your AWS environment using Cloud Formation templates. There are currently three ways of using this offering:

    • A single AMI instance – this is very useful if you already have a private cloud this helps you add EC2 instances which can run BWCE docker containers using the new billing model
    • Cloud Formation – Create TIBCO BWCE base docker image, push to ECR and set up ECS cluster for BWCE app deployment.
  • Customized Cloud Formation. Same as #2 but it allows you to customize the image by adding your own artifacts – e.g Java Bundles or JDBC drivers etc.

I believe that this is going to help customers to really use the cloud the way it was meant to be and promised.  I would love to know what our users think about this offering.