The world needs a new Platform as a Service, and we are working hard on its beta launch - coming to you later this month.
While we are putting the last touches of paint, perfecting documentation, and fixing the last few remaining bugs, we wanted to make a very quick pause and tell you what we are doing and why.
Let's start with 'what'
Jelastic - is a cloud platform which lets you upload any Java application (just your standard WAR package) and run it there - so no code changes required or platform lock-in imposed.
What makes is special is Jelastic's ability to automatically scale the application. That's right, Jelastic is smart enough to simply detect how much RAM and CPU the application needs right now and provide these resources to it (within the limits you specify).
Autoscaling with no application restrictions applied is the cloud magic which we believe Java needed for a long time!
Hopefully 'why' is now obvious
There just was not such a thing before.
Traditional hosting had no scaling or platform management at all. Developers had to accurately predict the load and commit to the number (and size) of servers they need. And then set these up and maintain them.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) vendors such as Amazon made provisioning easy (you can get a new server in minutes when you need it), but required to design applications for horizontal scalability - that is make your application capable of running simultaneously on multiple machines so more load can be handled by more servers. And you still had to manage the actual server images - deploy the stack that you need (e.g. Tomcat), patch it, and so on.
First generation of Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions such as Google App Engine, Force.com, Windows Azure, and VMware CloudFoundry kind of started solving the autoscaling and stack management problems but at a huge price of platform lock-in - applications had to be designed specifically to run on these platforms and nothing else.
Later this month we will be launching Jelastic which will be the first example of second generation on PaaS. Providing all the benefits of Platform as a Service such as autoscaling, ease of deployment, and ease of management - with no downside: no lock-in or requirement to re-write your application.
Keep coming to this site to be the first to learn when we launch!
New Java PaaS launching soon
