User:N2living/APS

History
The Application Packaging Standard (APS) was develpoed by Parallels in partnership with 1 & 1, in 2007 , to facilitate the process of bringing new applications and service to the infrastructure operated by the Hosting Provider industry toward new revenue models and to enable opportunities for higher industry revenue and growth.

Parallels is touting APS as a technology that can bring standardization to the web hosting industry and allow hundreds of thousands of hosting providers and independent software vendors, of all sizes, to form a Cloud Computingecosystem. The combined size of the ecosystem participants would allow them to compete with the industry giants such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon. It is well known that Cloud Computing is a major trend in the IT industry and it’s clear that there will emerge several computing mega-clouds and related ecosystems owned by the largest ISVs – Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Oracle, etc. – hosting applications from the owner and other ISVs. To stay relevant, hosting service providers need to create a computing cloud and an ecosystem that is as attractive to users (in terms of number of applications available) and ISVs (number of potential customers/users) as any of the mega-clouds. The only way the service providers can achieve the scale required for building successful clouds and ecosystems is to combine their infrastructures into a meta-cloud by adopting a standard way to provision, manage and integrate software applications from a variety of software vendors.

APS Purpose
The purpose of the Application Packaging Standard (APS) lies in two areas, technical and business.

Technical: Standardize technologies for provisioning, delivering, licensing, managing and integrating applications and services that run on the cloud computing infrastructure.

Business: Create a large-scale cloud computing ecosystem that allows independent software vendors and cloud operators (web hosting providers) to compete with the industry giants while staying smaller and independent. so together they can deliver a wide variety of services to businesses and consumers.

Overview
The APS standard is a set of specifications that covers provisioning, management and integration of cloud-based services and applications[1]. APS is designed from the ground up to address requirements of Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud computing paradigms, such as full automation and role-based access control. APS is an open standard, with all specifications available for free.

The APS standard is a set of specifications that covers provisioning, management and integration of cloud-based services and applications:

• APS package – a ZIP archive that incudes all application files as well as application metadata in APS format.

• APS metadata format – an XML document that provides sufficient amount of information about application properties and requirements to be provisioned and managed by APS

• APS catalog – a centralized catalog of APS packages. APS catalog includes 2000+ applications.

Top APS Catalog Entries are

joomla - WordPress - Drupal - phpBB - osCommerce - DotNetNuke - typo3 - gallery - SugarCRM - 4images - movabletype - SquirrelMail - Magento - WebCalendar - Coppermine - PinnacleCart - AutoIndex - mantis - mediawiki - phpAds - eGroupWare

APS2 – the next major version of APS due in the fall of 2009 – was announced to also include:

• APS identity – single sign-on technology based on identity federation

• APS embedding – technology APS applications need to support to embed their management UI into UI of control of the hosting provider

• APS integration – technology APS application would use to publishing and discover resources

• APS license format – a standardized envelope format for delivering and managing application licenses

The Application Packaging Standard (APS) website is at www.apstandard.org and currently holds over 200 third party applications such as collaboration, eCommerce and CRM. End Users can obtain these applications through their hosting service providers.

Technology
The APSstandard.org website has all the necessary documentation for third party application developers to package their applications and service providers to understand APS requirements for Control Panels.

The documentation includes:

Specification

Certification Criteria

Design Guide

SDK

The APS documentation can be found at www.apstandard.org

Applications
The applications most commonly packaged for APS are web apps, those that are single tenant and accessed/operated through a web browser such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari. Since there are many types of applications that fit into this description, the APS Catalog has grown from simple wiki's to eCommerce shopping Carts to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. Below is a partial list of applications in the APS Catalog

Providers
To offer applications to their End User customers, Service Providers can either use APS compatible Control Panels from Parallels, such as Parallels Automation or Parallels Plesk Panel, or use their own APS Certified Control Panel.

Service Prviders offering applications packaged in APS, can either offer these applications for free, charge customers as part of an "Application Pack" or offer the applications individually. The service provider will either use the application offerings to add value to service plans in order to attract new customers and retain exisiting customers and/or offer applications to increase their average revenue per user (ARPU).

A short list of APS enabled Hosting Providers is located at the APSstandard.org website: http://www.apstandard.org/providers.

End Users
End Users can obtain APS packaged applications through their hosting service providers. Providers can offer these applications to End Users in several ways. End Users either see the applications bundled with multi-tiered service plans, as part of a specific application pack (e.g. SMB Application Pack) or offered individually as in the case of the larger applications.

If offered as a separate application pack or individually, End Users will subscribe to the applications in a SaaS delivery model. The subscription fee may vary from application to application and also by service provider.