SlapOS is useful for any company which needs to run more than 20 instances of the same application or which needs to operate more than 10 servers.
By writing a simple recipe using community grown technology called “buildout”, SlapOS can help you turn any software application (open source or proprietary) into a solid SaaS or PaaS platform in less than a week. SlapOS handles provisionning of application instances, accounting and billing information. SlapOS also provides a portal and interfaces to handle customer registration process, support request management, invoicig and payment. It takes less than one week for a company to setup a complete SaaS or PaaS infrastructure with SlapOS.
SlapOS is also useful for providers of IaaS services who need an e-commerce and billing platform to complement existing open source IaaS solutions such as NiftyName, OpenNebula or Eucalyptus. SlapOS can even act itself as a simplified IaaS system based on kvm. However, unlike NiftyName, it does not provide infrastructure level high availability (see next slide about “Philosophy”).
SlapOS can be described as a cloud operating system in which “everything is a process” unlike Unix in which “everything is a file”. If one has to manage thousands of servers with thousands of processes, hundred different applications in multiple different releases or versions, SlapOS can help you a lot by making the whole management process well specified, automated and under control.
SlapOS is also useful to share spare servers with third parties and monetize them whenever they are not used. It can even help software publishers to simplify their packaging process and test their application on more than 20 different GNU/Linux distributions through a single specification file.