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
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:
- Instant access to 100,000+ pre-defined server templates, giving you the ability to deploy a wider range of server software than ever before.
- 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).
- Deploy the same server template on your laptop (e.g. via Docker® Compose) as you use in production on our Jelastic PaaS.
Layershift Jelastic PaaS – unlimited edition
Hate trials that are so limited they’re effectively “crippleware”? Yeah, so do we! Sadly a few budding trialists brought it to our attention that we’re guilty of this heinous crime – today we’re putting that right.
The Jelastic PaaS is a polyglot platform, supporting applications authored in a variety of programming languages, and running a wide selection of application and database servers.
With this power comes great responsibility. A responsibility to set the resource limits high enough to suit a vast assortment of different technologies, frameworks, and server stacks. It turns out that some of your apps (particularly Java EE apps) are heavily performance limited – or may not run at all – with our old trial limits.
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!”]
Hack Manchester 2013 – Jelastic Challenge Round-up
Hack Manchester, the 25 hour “24 hour” coding competition right here in Manchester, UK, recently saw 230 developers descend onto MOSI over the weekend of 26th / 27th October to kick-start the Manchester Science Festival.
72 teams competed, with 30 projects eventually submitted to competition judges for the various sponsor challenges.
Layershift challenged teams to ignite their creative juices on our innovative Jelastic Java & PHP PaaS – with a cool £800 in Amazon vouchers on offer for the winners.
An amazing 1 in 5 teams took up the mantle and engaged with our particular challenge – and 12 out of the 30 final entries (i.e. 40% of all entries) used our platform in some way for their project, demonstrating far lower attrition for the wise teams who chose to develop on our Jelastic PaaS vs. those who didn’t. Startups take note here!
Phalcon PHP on Jelastic
Every developer knows that frameworks are a great help to implement a lot of application features in a very short time. Frameworks provide impressive development speed, but all of that power and functionality usually comes at a high cost – performance!
Writing your own code, line by line, can lead to a more efficient solution – but it’s so much slower to develop. What if you could enjoy the benefits of a powerful framework to do more in less time, but still end up with a high performance application instead of something you have to time with a calendar?
Frameworks intentionally do a lot of heavy lifting for you, but that means your “simple” one-line code is actually a lot more complex than you probably realise! It’s not their fault things run slowly – all of those abstraction layers and modules running as PHP code – expecting it to perform well is a big ask.
Let me introduce a real gem of a framework here to solve that problem for you – Phalcon. It borrows from the ideas of PHP: running as compiled C code (just like the PHP engine itself does). By removing that extra layer (PHP) and running the framework at a lower level it performs much faster. It’s a more lightweight and nimble creature.
Don’t worry, you don’t need to learn a new language to use it: all of your code is still written in PHP!