Amazon Invests In Cloud Specialist Elastra

Elastra, a fast-moving startup I've written about twice in recent weeks, has just closed $12 million in Series B funding from investors including Amazon.com. Elastra's Cloud Server can be used to develop and manage applications in Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. The company is developing a version of its software for VMware-based "private clouds" in corporate data centers.The Elastra Cloud Server is a software bundle introduced in March that's in preview release. It comes with a repository, deployment, and monitoring capabilities, and two markup languages. Elastra's Elastic Compute Markup Language describes the components of an application to be deployed and related software and hardware requirements, while its Elastic Compute Deployment Language specifies how that application is to be deployed in IT infrastructure.

When I spoke to Elastra CEO Kirill Sheynkman a few weeks ago, he said the company had about 40 customers. A quarter of those are the result of a partnership with EnterpriseDB that combines the EnterpriseDB database with Elastra's Cloud Server in Amazon Web Services.

At the time, Elastra had only four enterprise customers; most of its other customers were other software vendors or Web companies looking to offer software-as-a-service or tap into cloud services themselves. Elastra will try to expand its enterprise customer base in two ways. First, it plans to tweak Cloud Server to support the various elements of the open source LAMP stack in Amazon and other cloud services. And second, it's developing a version of Cloud Server for VMware.

Once done, the VMware port can be used by IT departments to create private clouds in their own data centers, says Sheynkman. The VMware version of Cloud Server is due in October.

Elastra will use its second-round funding for software development and sales. In addition to Amazon, Bay Partners and Hummer Winblad Venture Partners participated in the investment round.

For more on Elastra, see "Startup Of The Week: Elastra" and "The Rise Of Enterprise-Class Cloud Computing."