Shifting workloads to public or even private clouds is becoming less of a burden with a new generation of tools aimed at bridging the integration issues that applications face across multiple environments.

One of the latest solutions is the new version of rPath's rBuilder system, which is used to create Linux-based virtual appliances that allow apps to traverse from one cloud to another, says InformationWeek. The original rBuilder was a free online tool designed to build Amazon Machine Images for the EC2 cloud using the Xen hypervisor.

Version 5 of the software is described as an enterprise tool capable of building appliances for servers or various virtual machine environments, such as VMware's ESX Server and Microsoft's Hyper-V. It provides an open source repository for storing virtual appliances and their associated configuration data, and contains a management console that can be used to quickly launch pre-configured applications on either bare servers or private clouds.

The system has also been expanded to work with a wider variety of cloud services, such as BlueLock and Nimbus.

Pricing is based on the number of application instances. The first-year base fee is $35,000, although there is a free trial download that provides up to 20 application packages.