OnApp has just acquired SolusVM, the virtual server management system.
The SolusVM team and the SolusVM product are now part of the OnApp family.
Why have they done this?
SolusVM is a very different product to OnApp. It’s focused on simple, no-frills VM deployment – no failover, no autoscaling, no storage flexibility, no CDN and so on but for the bare-bones VPS market, where people just want to spin up a VM, it’s a a perfect platform.
In that way it’s a great complement to OnApp, and in fact they have many customers running both systems side-by-side already, targeting different parts of the market at different price points. They are not going to change that. SolusVM and OnApp will be developed, sold and supported separately, to meet those different market needs.
That’s pretty cool. But this is even better. While they are not planning to change the scope of SolusVM, they are going to enable SolusVM to access OnApp Federation infrastructure.
In other words, they going to give a couple of thousand SolusVM hosts – and hundreds of thousands of Solus VMs – the ability to deploy on OnApp cloud infrastructure, anywhere in the world. The SolusVM community is an awesome, global community of hosts and end users who need infrastructure for VMs, and soon they’ll be able to buy it through the OnApp Federation.
Why does this change everything?
The OnApp Federation is a new type of marketplace. When you’re building a new market you have to balance supply and demand, and so far they have focused mainly on the supply side – enabling hundreds of providers to contribute infrastructure. By welcoming the SolusVM community into the Federation, they are boosting the demand side too.
This is going to kickstart the OnApp ecosystem and create new opportunities for every member of the Federation, whether you’re selling capacity, or using OnApp with federated cloud or CDN resources, or using SolusVM + federation to create your own Digital Ocean/Linode service.