Continuuity today announced the public beta of Continuuity Developer Suite and Continuuity Developer Sandbox. Delivered as a cloud PaaS, the Continuuity AppFabric is an application runtime and data platform, which sits on top of open source Hadoop components. The Continuuity AppFabric allows for application deployment, monitoring and elastic scalability.

The free Developer Suite provides a SDK with an Eclipse IDE plugin and pre-built Dataset patterns for data modeling and manipulation. Bundled with a single-node edition of the Continuuity AppFabric, it includes developer tools to accelerate application creation for local testing.

The Continuuity Developer Sandbox is a free, self-service instance of the Continuuity AppFabric that developers can use to deploy, manage and monitor applications in the cloud. The Sanbox, currently in public beta, allows for access to 8 cores, 8 GB of memory and 240 GB of storage. For production, developers can choose either the Continuuity Virtual Private Cloud Edition or the Continuuity On-Premise Edition, both currently in private beta.

"Developers are always looking for tools to make it faster and easier to build applications," said RedMonk analyst Donnie Berkholz. "With the public beta of Continuuity's Developer Suite and Developer Sandbox, the company is aiming directly at the barrier to entry for developers to create Big Data apps."

With Developer Suite and Developer Sandbox, Continuuity allows access to higher level APIs, sample libraries and a flexible runtime.

Typical use cases for the Continuuity AppFabric include Consumer Intelligence applications like social analytics, A/B testing, targeting and personalization efforts. Other use cases center around analytics processing, machine-to-machine networks, anomaly detection and streaming analytics.

"The public beta launch of both the Continuuity Developer Suite and Developer Sandbox will give developers the chance to experience the full end-to-end Continuuity application lifecycle," said Todd Papaioannou, co-founder and CEO at Continuuity. "Integrated tools and cloud platforms that accelerate application development and infrastructure deployment allow companies to reuse existing development talent and rapidly monetize data with a new wave of Big Data applications."