Building highly available services can be a challenge. At Braintree, we value simplicity, open source and cheap commodity hardware. While many companies attempt to achieve high-availability through expensive, proprietary components like SANs and hardware load balancers, these sorts of devices are fraught with their own peril.

BlazeMeter, provider of the Apache JMeter™ based load testing platform, has announced its complete integration into CloudBees, the leading provider of Java Platform as a Service (PaaS), which provides a foundation for cloud development and deployment services.

Micro Focus has announced the availability of SilkPerformer CloudBurst, a peak demand load testing capability based on Micro Focus Enterprise Cloud Services (ECS) technology. CloudBurst extends Micro Focus’ industry-leading load and performance testing solution SilkPerformer out to the cloud. With CloudBurst, SilkPerformer enables testing organizations to easily manage large load tests that emulate hundreds of thousands of users from multiple global points of presence and to quickly diagnose and resolve discovered issues.

This session introduces a new and highly-requested language for Google App Engine. The new runtime allows developers to take advantage of App Engine’™s powerful scaling, services, durability, and ease of use, while leveraging familiar and powerful frameworks to build applications.

CloudBees announced support for GlassFish v3 while also making Java EE 7 immediately available to developers. CloudBees is the first PaaS provider to offer the new Java distribution on its platform. Java EE 7 features higher productivity and HTML5 support in the form of WebSocket and JSON.

SUSE® and WSO2 have announced a partnership to provide jointly certified and supported middleware and Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions for developing and deploying next-generation applications on-premise or in cloud environments.

Progress Software Corporation has introduced Progress® Pacific™, a powerful, easy-to-use platform for building and managing “connected apps” on any cloud, mobile or social platform. Connected applications integrate with real-time data from multiple sources for faster business reaction, analysis and problem solving. Progress Pacific is a fundamental new approach that gives businesses and independent software vendors (ISVs) the freedom to choose the data sources, deployment environments and business logic tools that best fit their needs.

Engine Yard has announced that Rob Walters has been appointed as the company’s new CTO. Walters will play a major role in shaping the company’s technology strategy as Engine Yard continues its worldwide expansion in the growing cloud market. A proven leader of product management, marketing and engineering teams in the cloud and enterprise software markets, Walters has more than 20 years experience working for major international firms.

Some applications simply cannot be contained. Perhaps you want to write a worker that periodically polls for updates or performs a maintenance task. Perhaps you would like to use a new lightweight web framework. You don’t necessarily want to build a WAR for these types of apps.

IBM today announced new software, training and resources to help organizations create, test and deliver mobile and cloud applications. These new initiatives expand the development capabilities of IBM’s SmartCloud and IBM MobileFirst offerings.