Jelastic Asgard 4.7: Data Storage Container for Optimized Space Sharing

| July 6, 2016 | News, Storage

We are glad to announce our latest release, named Jelastic Asgard 4.7, that provides support of a certified Data Storage Container. The feature guarantees a number of significant benefits, aimed to improve data handling by sharing it within clustered environments that are scaled horizontally, as well as to optimize the disk space consumption to decrease the spends.

“Simplicity is important, now any container can easily share data with other containers across clustered environments. It helps to build highly scalable applications by keeping persistent data available for all services from a shared storage. And Jelastic platform provides the needed level of  automation for a smooth user experience while interconnecting the containers,” said Ruslan Synytsky, CEO at Jelastic.

Data Storage Container represents a special type of a node that keeps the required part of data and can be connected to the other containers. That is why this release was named Asgard, as due to the mythology, it was a place where all gods lived (all data stored) and the other worlds were connected to it (as connected containers).

"It is great to see how fast the platform is improving and how development embraces very useful new features for users to setup different hosting solutions. With separated storage containers and different mounting options we can provide our customers new ways to store and use their data, giving them more possibilities to run and maintain their application landscape," said Neven Dogovic, Product Owner Hostnet.

This newly added functionality provides the following advantages:

  • Data Persistence and Security - the data is totally safe and secure as it runs inside fully isolated containers and stored separately during the application updates
  • Simplified Management - one set of configurations for multiple containers, different types of data storing, integration with Docker volumes and built-in file manager
  • Funds Saving - shared data implies lower disk space consumption and therefore lower costs
  • High Availability - out-of-the-box integration with software-defined storage for containers

"Thanks to the Asgard 4.7, a new version of Jelastic Platform, environments setting and management become even easier! As for the Data Storage Container, one of the most important features available in this version, is the option to have a dedicated container only for volume data management, which solves the problem of the duplicated content between nodes that provide the same service," said Marco Zani, neen CEO.

Jelastic uses the network file system (NFS) on the data storage node to provide export of volumes to other instances. Jelastic provides four main types of data storing that can be mixed and matched:

The introduced solution is applicable to all the Jelastic certified containers, as well as to custom Docker images, where such integration is implemented based on volumes functionality. The process is completely automated by the Jelastic PaaS, so you only need to add a mount point through the corresponding form  - file manager or Docker volumes configuration section. The further required operations will be done by platform automatically. In such a way, any container at Jelastic can be easily treated as either storage or client upon the necessity.

“With the new Data Storage Container feature we are able to scale horizontally even though file uploads are being processed in the traditional way. This puts us in the position of promoting GroundCTRL as an enterprise solution even better,” said Harm Jan Stam, Technical Supervisor at Oxilion.

In addition to Data Storage Container, Jelastic Asgard release includes a set of requested improvements like Dockers integration enhancements, automatic quotas update for existing containers, UI/UX updates, API improvements, external traffic triggers for automatic horizontal scaling and others.

Full information about all Jelastic updates and improvements can be found in Release Notes 4.7