When we began building Contegix, we realized it was always about the applications.  No one buys a server (physical or virtual) to run a ping and get some ICMP packets.  The Internet has, and always will be, about the applications.  Therefore, we made the application infrastructure the core of our management and focus of our hosting services.

As we build out cloud templates, we want to extend this belief into the templates themselves.  It can not be about just the operating system.  Each template has been built “The Contegix Way”.  These are built using the components and deployment methodologies that have served our customers for years and continue to do so today.  Some of these target developers, some for system administrator implementors, and some target application users.  Below is our list, but we want your feedback.

For developers:

• Linux 64-bit with Apache HTTPd + Jetty
• Linux 64-bit with Apache HTTPd + Apache Tomcat 6
• Linux 64-bit with Apache HTTPd + Apache Tomcat 6 + Grails 1.2 (well, we can hope 1.2 will be done soon  )
• Linux 64-bit with Apache HTTPd + Phusion Pasenger + Ruby Enterprise
• Linux 64-bit with Apache HTTPd + Django

For system administrators / application implementors:

• Linux 64-bit with MySQL 5
• Linux 64-bit with PostgreSQL 8.4
• Linux 64-bit with MongoDB (probably… working on it!)

For application users:

• Linux 64-bit with MovableType
• Linux 64-bit with WordPress + MySQL 5

Yet, we want to hear – what do you want to see in a cloud template and ready to deploy in less than 5 minutes?  Please leave comments.

We have been chatting about our cloud computing platform (known internally as Project Zeus but to be official named later) a fair amount in the past few months.  We have talked about our features and it being truly designed for the enterprise – small and large.  We have not talked about how it was built.

Earlier this week, our development team at Relevance put up a blog post on their work on the web and mid tiers for the project.  This promises to be the first in a series on how to build a cloud computing platform.  At least, how Contegix built a cloud computing platform designed around our principles and requirements.

Read the post, and one will find a number of interesting jewels.  One thing might stick out as very interesting. While we are known for our Java hosting, our cloud was built using Ruby and Rails.  Relevance used JRuby in the mid-tier for  numerous reasons, including the VIJava library for VMware.  The web tier is pure Rails 2.3.2.  Since Contegix is one of the largest managed Rails hosting companies and has been for quite awhile (anyone miss the Apache+fcgi days?), this was a natural infrastructure for us to support.

More information coming about our cloud late next week.  Launch is quickly approaching!