Skydera leaves the stealth mode and enters the cloud management market

At the end of July a new startup entered the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing market: Skydera.

The startup, incubated at the Founder Institute, is focused on cloud management.
It was founded in late 2009 by Lecole Cole, currently covering the CEO role.
Cole has been the Director of Systems Engineering at WindSpring for two years, and the Engineering Lead at Tele Atlas for one year before that.
Despite the public launch, the company is not yet fully exposed, so the rest of the management team is unknown.

Skydera’s platform, currently in beta, supports the four major public IaaS cloud providers: Amazon (all AWS regions supported), Rackspace, GoGrid, and Slicehost.
It’s also able to manage private clouds but the company doesn’t specify which hypervisors are supported.

As many competing products in this increasingly crowded market segment, Skydera technology offers pretty all the features you would expect from a cloud management solution:

  • self-service provisioning (through a web portal)
  • virtual machines and templates library
  • resource pooling
  • metering, reporting and billing
  • role-based access control (RBAC) with administration delegation
  • user grouping
  • multi-tenancy
  • disaster recovery
  • service level agreements (SLA) enforcement
  • secure connectivity (through VPN)
  • data replication across cloud providers
  • API

The disaster recovery feature has an interesting twist: it allows to fail-over a virtual machine from a faulty public cloud infrastructure to another.

The platform is available on-premises and as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application.
The SaaS edition is  is billed on a month-to-month basis, while the on-premises edition is offered through a pay-per-use pricing model for SMBs, or an annual licensing contract for Enterprise customers.