Using New Relic on our Jelastic PaaS made easy

New Relic Jelastic

In the wake of Black Friday / Cyber Monday, you’re probably not alone if you’re scratching your head wondering how to make sure your January Sale runs a little smoother!

New Relic is one of the most popular tools to monitor application performance and identify troublesome code bottlenecks. Such deep insights are invaluable because they enable you to focus your effort on the parts that need you most.

The immense flexibility of our Jelastic PaaS means it was always easy to install New Relic on a Java based environment, but now we are pleased to offer an easy solution for PHP environments too!

All Layershift Jelastic PaaS customers can now install New Relic on their PHP environments with just a few clicks.

New Relic – A watchdog you want to keep safe

There are many application monitoring services that will keep vigil and inform you if something goes wrong, but unlike most New Relic is not focused on your uptime. It focuses on performance.

Almost uniquely, this tool enables you to drill down through your code, so you know which specific function calls or SQL queries were executing slowly – not just that the overall response to the end user was slower.

Of course this is combined with a lovely sprinkling of RUM (real user monitoring) features and general performance tracking alerts to round out the solution.

Overall we think this makes New Relic a really useful companion for any production server, as it allows you to keep a close eye over your app performance AND know what steps to take if performance starts to degrade. This is crucial when it comes to maintaining user experience during those seasonal traffic peaks.

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PHP 7 hosting now on our Cloud VPS range

It’s been less than a week since the official release date, but we are proud to say that we fully support early adopters who would like to deploy their application using the latest version of PHP.

Why switch to PHP 7 hosting?

The improvement in performance compared to previous PHP versions is almost unbelievable, reportedly between 25% to 70% increase on major PHP based applications. Not only that, but memory consumption was also reduced significantly, so putting it simply, you can do more with less.

There are a bunch of new features as well, some of which we have been waiting for for a long time:

  • Scalar type declarations – probably the most controversial of all new features, however by using this marble of code, you will be able to set clear expectations for return values of functions and find possible code errors faster. Together with this feature, they also introduced support for new scalar types: integer, boolean, string and floating-point numbers.

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How to run Slack alternative Mattermost in 5 minutes on Layershift Jelastic PaaS!

Mattermost LayershiftMattermost is self-hosted team communication service bringing messaging and file sharing into one place, accessible across PCs and phones, with archiving and search. It integrates with an array of applications and because it is an open source project, you can build whatever new functionality you need atop its core features.

Although the Mattermost developers publish a Docker image, they do not recommend it for production deployment. So we’ve done the hard work for you and created a pre-packaged production-ready Mattermost environment using nginx and postgres nodes.

To install Mattermost, simply log into your Jelastic Dashboard, open Marketplace and search for ‘mattermost’:

Mattermost Layershift

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Light up the cloud with our Singapore discounts!

To celebrate the Festival of Lights – Deepavali – and our phenomenal growth since first launching our Singapore range over 4 years ago, we are offering our most popular Singapore Fully Managed Cloud VPS plans with an amazing 50% lifetime discount!

Like the Deepavali sweets, our stock is limited so grab your lifetime discount while you can.

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Enhanced Docker® Lifecycle Support on Layershift Jelastic PaaS

The latest platform upgrade on the Layershift Jelastic PaaS delivers three great headline benefits that every Layershift customer should take advantage of today.

1. Docker® on Jelastic PaaS is now GA

Docker Jelastic PaaS hosting

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ve probably heard of Docker®. That little fish has made big waves.

Back in April, we announced how Layershift’s private cloud customers were already using Jelastic together with the Docker® packaging standard to use this technology in advanced real-world DevOps workflows.

We just made this a whole lot easier and more flexible with support for volumes. Volumes allow you to dispose of your container without disposing of your data – hence you can upgrade your container to a later version (e.g. switch Docker® image tag).

With this feature we are also making our Docker® feature GA (generally available) to all paid public PaaS account customers by default, marking it out as a first-class citizen available for all to use and enjoy.

This is a great moment to briefly recap the main benefits of using Docker® powered nodes within your Jelastic PaaS environments:

  1. Instant access to 100,000+ pre-defined server templates, giving you the ability to deploy a wider range of server software than ever before.
  2. Define your own server templates – including standing on the shoulders of giants by basing your template atop of any existing one (for example, if you just need to make a minor modification or addition).
  3. Deploy the same server template on your laptop (e.g. via Docker® Compose) as you use in production on our Jelastic PaaS.

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