Stealth startup Makara is launching publicly tonight with its cloud-based application deployment and management platform. Formerly known as WebappVM, Makara has raised angel funding from Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The startup also raised $6 million last year from Shasta Ventures and Sierra Ventures.
Rather than offer a system management software designed for traditional application environments to the cloud, Makara’s cloud-based platform leverages the virtual layer to allow developers to rapidly deploy, scale and monitor applications in cloud environments. The product, which is self-service and self-managing, is available for free on its site.
The startup’s platform allows developers to deploy new or existing web applications to a public or private cloud with no code changes. Once the application is deployed, developers can control the application runtime and have cluster-wide visibility into end user response times end-to-end through the entire stack. Makara’s offering supports Java, Flex, PHP, JBoss and Tomcat applications and runs on Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud, Terremark vCloud Express, VMware ESX, VMware Workstation, VirtualBox and Xen. Makara faces competition from rPath.