Introduction

Jelastic, founded in 2011, is a cloud platform software vendor that provides Multi-Cloud PaaS (Platform as a Service) based on container technology for hosting service providers. In this article, we will take a quick overview of this product and see together the main features availables.

What is PaaS ?

To begin with, let’s describre what is exactly a “PaaS”.

Platform as a service (PaaS) is a cloud computing model in which a third-party provider delivers hardware and software tools to users over the internet. A PaaS provider hosts the hardware and software on its own infrastructure.

• SaaS examples : Dropbox, Google Apps…
• PaaS examples : Windows Azure, Jelastic, Heroku
• IaaS examples : AWS, Microsoft Azure, DFi DiamondCloud

Jelastic is a great tool for developers who want to build, deploy and scale applications in the Cloud. It supports PHP, Java, Python, Node.js, Ruby or Docker-based applications.

Deployments of apps are fast and your customers will pay only for what they use. Moreover, deployments are auto-scaled which will garantee good performances at the best price.

Now let’s see what features are availables !

Multi-Cloud

Using Jelastic you can achieve higher availability through geo-distribution. Indeed. you can easily locate your projects as you want.

Jelastic PaaS is available across 60+ data centers in 30 countries worldwide. You can deploy applications within hardware regions of a single cloud provider or across multiple using the same technology, same API and automation scripts !

Environment Regions Migration

The initially chosen location of the project can be easily changed using the migration option. It represents an extremely powerful tool, that can help you to benefit in both cost and productivity :

Automatic replication of application instances

Application instances are automatically replicated and fail-over seamlessly, with zero user impact. Isolation of application resources leads to less application downtime and maximum availability.

Scale your application automatically, vertically AND horizontally

“Elastic automatic scaling” enables granular resource allocation based on the load level. This ensures high performance, application availability and uptime, at the same time, cost efficiency by paying only for really consumed resources.

Scale Vertically

Jelastic will dynamically change the amount of allocated to server resources (RAM and CPU) according to its current demands.

Scale Horizontally

Horizontal scaling is the process of changing the number of nodes within a single layer. Herewith, the Jelastic PaaS automatically ensure the following benefits, while utilizing this feature. There are 2 scaling mode :

• Stateless – simultaneously creates all new nodes from the base image template
• Stateful – sequentially copies file system of the master container into the new nodes

Pricing

Jelastic PaaS provides a versatile pricing model, that can be adjusted to meet the requirements of the most demanding customers due to the number of awesome features:

• The resources are provisioned with granular units – cloudlets (128MiB of RAM and 400MHz of CPU). This allows to allocate exactly the needed amount of resources.
• Fully automatic vertical and horizontal scaling assure that you’ll be provided only with the required capacities without overpaying for unused resources.
• The system of automatic discounts makes the Jelastic usage even more beneficial when the volume of ordered resources grows.

In contrast to the majority of other vendors, all of these features allow Jelastic to provide a truly user-oriented Pay-per-Use charging approach:

Deployments

Jelastic PaaS supports various ways of the applications automatic deployment, allowing to choose the most suitable option, which will suit your specific needs.

Fast deployment

You can use several options within the deployment frame. Indeed, any application can be deployed in just minutes using GIT, SVN, archive etc.

The Market Place

Jelastic Marketplace is a library of the most popular and requested applications, which are configured and optimized in the most beneficial way via the Jelastic Packaging Standard.

These packaged solutions can be installed automatically directly from the dashboard, skipping many steps of manual deployment and optimization :

Easy management

Jelastic provides management flexibility with access to application configuration files through a simple UI. For more complex configurations, SSH access to containers is available !

Easy containers migration

Jelastic is able to migrate application containers live, between different hardware nodes without downtime. Anti-affinity for smart distribution across hardware, ensures that app containers will not be placed on the same hardware.

 Automated CI/CD Pipelines

For simplifying deployment automation, advanced CI/CD packages can be used to deliver code into the preliminary built container images. These packages implement a number of configurations to set up automatic deployment with committed changes to the cloud using GitHub, GitLab, Docker Hub or Jenkins, making them available for the further testing with minimal delays !

In the next article, we will see together how to create easily a WordPress Cluster through Jelastic !

Sources

docs.jelastic.com