Jelastic PaaS saves you even more money this spring
Yes, we know that Spring started a little while ago, but a new lower price needs a nice headline so what can you do?
Great news! We’ve just slashed our Jelastic PaaS pricing, bringing the base cost down from £7.30 per cloudlet to just £4.75 per cloudlet!
But we didn’t stop there. We’ve also dramatically simplified our automatic volume discount tiers to just 3 levels – providing the maximum discount level to environments with as little as 16 cloudlets (previously required 512+ cloudlets for max. discount).
Jelastic now up to 75% cheaper than AWS
Even though AWS is predominantly an IaaS platform (not a PaaS like Jelastic), there’s no denying that they’re the industry benchmark. Many have already discovered that you can save big by switching from AWS to Jelastic, but now you can save even more – our latest price cuts deliver up to 75% saving just against their basic pricing:
AWS t1.micro instance in EU region with 10GB EBS + 1,000GB/month traffic:
$135.15 / month (approx. £80)
Equivalent Layershift Jelastic PaaS environment (hosted in the UK):
£18.98 / month (75% saving)
The example above assumes 80% server utilisation (which is quite high; even for a small server) – if your usage is actually lower you can potentially save a lot more by using Layershift’s Jelastic PaaS, because unlike AWS we charge for your actual usage rather than your requested server size.
That’s not to mention the huge time savings from using a fully-featured next generation PaaS vs. a basic IaaS!
Get your free Jelastic PaaS account
[Tweet “Jelastic PaaS @Layershift costs up to 75% less than AWS + support, SLAs, and backups included free!”]
Save money with Jelastic’s new optimised Garbage Collector Agent
A few short months ago we explained how to experiment with custom JVM Garbage Collector settings on our Jelastic PaaS.
The fantastic development team behind Jelastic just announced that they too were hard at work experimenting with the GC, and as a result they’ve introduced new default GC settings to help to provide optimum performance right out of the box for all of your Java applications.
New default Garbage Collector settings
Prior to this update, Jelastic used the Serial GC by default if the Cloudlet Scaling Limit was set at or below 1GB (8 cloudlets), and the G1 GC by default if the Cloudlet Scaling Limit was set above 1GB.
OpenSSL vulnerability – Heartbleed Bug statement
You might think the Heartbleed bug is already history, but in recent days some of our customers have requested a public announcement due to the unprecedented media profile of this particular security vulnerability.
Whilst the media are (rightly, to an extent) making a lot of noise about this bug and its significance to the Internet population at large, the truth is we as sysadmins haven’t treated this security threat any differently to any other.
There are lots of important security vulnerabilities uncovered which have the potential to give an attacker full access to your server (arguably more serious than this case) – so we patch and workaround security vulnerabilities on an almost daily basis as part of our fully managed service. There is simply no reason or benefit to announce each and every one of these – our customers use our service to stay focused on their business rather than technical details like these.
Our expert technical team are always there in the background, performing server tune-ups to ensure that the configuration is optimal and secure at all times, so that you don’t have to.
If you somehow managed to miss the media coverage and the myriad of announcements and emails in your inbox about the Heartbleed bug, you can find more details regarding this vulnerability alert issued by the OpenSSL group on April 7, 2014: http://heartbleed.com/
Generating Jelastic SSH keys with PuTTYgen
We’ve just added key-based SSH access to our Jelastic PaaS, and with many of our Windows users using PuTTY as their preferred SSH client it seems a good moment to give a brief PuTTYgen walkthrough. Here’s how to generate SSH keys using PuTTY.
1. Download and open puttygen.exe (included with putty-version-installer.exe, or standalone)
2. Enter the following parameters (the defaults are fine):
How to Tune the Garbage Collector in Tomcat
The guys at PayPal recently switched away from Java, citing (perhaps false/questionable ?) performance gains. One important, but easily overlooked, way to keep your Java app performing at its best is to make sure that the JVM is well tuned to your needs – that includes taming the Garbage Collector.
If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution.
– Robert Sewell
Java’s Garbage Collector does an important job, and if you tune it properly, you can prevent memory intensive programs from freezing your system. It’s easy to assume that if you know how to develop large programs and applications, you probably already know how the Garbage Collection process works. Ergo if you choose the right Garbage Collector algorithm, it means you totally understand the features of the program you have developed.
If you’re not quite sure how the whole process works, we’ll try to summarise the most important aspects for you.
Meet the Garbage Collector, it will save your day!
You’ve just developed a large application, and you couldn’t be more excited! But, as this application runs, it creates objects; as it continues to run, many of these objects are no longer required and they cause your program to run out of memory for no apparent reason.