Thank you for visiting us at Cloud Expo Europe
On the 11th and 12th of March, cloud experts and enthusiasts gathered from all over the world in London, UK for the biggest and best attended cloud event in the world – Cloud Expo Europe.
The event attracted over 15,000 visitors including IT industry experts, decision makers, managers, developers, consultants from all walks and sizes of business.
We couldn’t miss this amazing opportunity to showcase our exciting range of services, so 4 of our brightest and best gleefully headed off to London for 2 eventful days of exhibiting.
Visitors to our stand learnt about our SSD-powered fully managed Cloud VPS with the Parallels Plesk 12 control panel, our new Traffic Guard service – an Inline Content Delivery Network, Web Application Firewall, & DDoS mitigation solution – and our award-winning auto-scaling PaaS, Jelastic, which is now also available as a Managed Private Cloud option.
Layershift on Size
Our stand proved to be massively popular, as we explained to visitors why ‘size doesn’t matter’! Which we found is always a great conversation starter…
Why? Because Jelastic’s unique automatic vertical scaling ensures you only pay based on your application’s resource needs, instead of paying by server instance size (as you’re forced to do with other platforms). With Layershift, the server size doesn’t matter. We only charge for resource usage.
Best of all, this works WITHOUT CODE CHANGES, so it makes it much easier to move legacy applications to the cloud today. Taken together, these points drew lots of attention as it’s a really unique and exciting benefit of our platform compared to any of the other exhibitors our visitors had spoken to.
At the same time, we found many visitors were surprised to learn about our zero lock-in approach, which firmly positions our Jelastic PaaS as a very low-risk solution for you to adopt in your organisation. No proprietary APIs, architectures, or other artificial barriers to entry or exit.
Most service providers are building lock-in into their solutions as a central pillar of their cloud hosting strategy – c/overtly tying customers into their platform with technical lock-ins such as refactoring applications to specific APIs, proprietary architectures, and other more subtle barriers to inhibit migrating away to a competitor. Meanwhile we are swimming in the opposite direction doing everything possible to be zero lock-in.
Winning the swag!
Naturally we had plenty of cool swag on offer, but in the spirit of the moment we added some gamification to the process.
A simple “spin to win” on our wheel of fortune style wheel determined whether you’d be enjoying our limited edition Rubik’s cube, debugging in style with our universal debugging tool – the duck (kudos to The Pragmatic Programmer), or snagging yourself up to £250(!) in free Jelastic credits – enough for a year or more of application hosting on our platform.
Two very lucky gents also walked away with some rather impressive tech. wizardry in the form of a Parrot Bebop drone quadcopter each, won in our daily prize draw.
Huge congratulations to both of them. Our entire team are extremely envious! Be sure to pilot them responsibly.
Javaman flew in to share his superknowledge
Speaking of flying, prize drawing duties were graciously performed by our friend Bruno Souza – better known as Javaman, who flew in all the way from Brazil especially for the event!
Bruno is a leading light in Java circles, responsible for the largest JUG in the world, Principal Consultant at Summa Technologies, founder of the worldwide Java user groups community, honorary director of the Open Source Initiative, and co-founder of ToolsCloud. Bruno is also known as the “Guy with the Flag” – although he says he walks around with the Brazilian flag just to be recognised, we don’t believe him – we know that really he wears that flag because he has Java superpowers; either way we were honoured to have him exhibiting with us, and we couldn’t be happier that Bruno is using his great superpowers to enhance the Jelastic PaaS!
We were also delighted to share the floor with him for an insightful session at Cloud Expo Europe, exploring how to benefit from Jelastic’s production-ready DevOps workflows, and the important security and isolation benefits Jelastic offers.
Enterprises looking to embrace DevOps via Docker® standard are in a difficult position. Docker® containers is not yet production ready, including some security risks and a general lack of project maturity, but to ignore it presents a risk that your competitors may gain a commercial advantage leading to some rather embarrassed CIOs to say the least!
Jelastic has solved this dilemma by utilising the Docker® standard as a packaging standard, but deploying the containers to its mature production-ready container virtualisation technology that already solves these key security and isolation issues. So in contrast to the rest of the market, currently deploying Docker® containers inside VMs (which rather defeats the point, eats up the benefits, and adds new problems), Jelastic gives you native container virtualisation that’s mature and already widely deployed across service provider and enterprise spheres for the last 10+ years.
This enables us to provide the Docker® standard in a production-ready format on the Jelastic platform today – so our customers are already starting to innovate with the Docker® standard as a useful packaging standard right now, and are already integrating this powerful tool into their DevOps workflows. This includes custom Docker® registry hub support, proper promotion through the dev => stage => test => production lifecycle, and live migration via checkpoint/restore in userspace (CRIU).
Great to meet you!
Once again, we want to say a big THANK YOU for taking the time to meet us at Cloud Expo Europe 2015.
We really enjoyed the opportunity to share our insights with you, and we hope that we’ve sparked your interest in using one or more of our services for your upcoming projects. For those who didn’t manage to make it to our stand and meet us in person, we’d still love to hear from you – you can reach out to our sales team via email, on Twitter @Layershift or on Google+ at +LayershiftHosting .