Continuity, a new startup founded by former Yahoo cloud VP Todd Papaioannou and Facebook engineer Jonathan Gray, wants to simplify Hadoop for developers. Gigaom’s Derrick Harris explains, “Rather than simply providing another cloud service for writing and running Hadoop jobs, Continuuity wants to be the middle man between developers and the complex Hadoop clusters below their applications.”
Continuity’s primary product is called AppFabric. It’s an SDK and set of APIs with a drag-and-drop interface that makes it easier for developers to create applications for working with big data without requiring them to learn all the intricacies of Hadoop. Essentially, it’s a platform as a service focused on big data.
Currently, App Fabric is in private beta with a public cloud computing version planned to debut in 2013.