Cloud Applications is a hosting service, powered by Jelastic. It's extremely easy to manage, thanks to an intuitive interface that allows you to customize resources and environment according to your needs. However, it is important to know the meaning of the main items that you will see once in the dashboard. Here is a short list of terms you need to know to customize the hosting at its best.
Paas and Caas
Cloud Applications is based on the union of the PaaS (Platform as a Service) and Caas (Container as a service) models. The PaaS model indicates a cloud service through which a provider provides a development environment and dedicated tools to design new applications. It's especially useful for software developers and companies who want to create and release new programs and apps quickly and easily without worrying about the infrastructure. The Caas model provides advanced services through cloud computing platforms and the availability of resources for “containerized virtualization”. Both models completely erase the costs of purchasing and managing the required hardware and software resources.
Cloudlet
The cloudlet is the unit of measurement of the resources (CPU and RAM) used in Keliweb Cloud. Each cloudlet corresponds to 128 MB of RAM and 400 MHz of CPU power. Cloudlets can be reserved or dynamic.
Reserved Cloudlets are fixed amount of resources reserved in advance and charged irrespective of the actual usage. Reserved cloudlets are cheaper than dynamic and recommended to be used when the application load is permanent.
Dynamic Cloudlets are added and removed automatically according to the amount of resources required by your application (assigned when load goes up and removed as soon as it drops down). Dynamic cloudlets are recommended to be used for applications with variable load or when it cannot be predicted in advance, ensuring the truly usage-based charging model. In such a way, so that you pay based on your actual resource usage within the scaling limit.
Environment
The environment represents the "space" that will host the application. It is composed of nodes at various levels of the application. The types of node are as follows:
- Balancing
- Application Servers
- Cache
- Databases (SQL, NoSQL)
- Additional Options (Storage, VPS, Build Node, SSL)
- Docker Engine
Container
A container (node) is an isolated virtualized instance, provisioned for software stack handling (like application servers, databases, load balancers etc) and placed on a particular host. Each container can be automatically scaled, both vertically and horizontally, making hosting of applications truly flexible. The platform provides certified containers for Java, PHP, Ruby, Node.js, Python, Go, .NET and the ability to deploy custom Docker containers. Each container has its own private IP and unique DNS record, whilst public IP can be easily attached within UI dashboard or via API.
Overquota
Overquota indicates the resources used in excess by the user with respect to the package he has purchased. The concept of overquota is generally used in two situations:
- In case of pay-as-you-go, for which the resources used in excess are charged according to the costs of the pay-per-use system.
- When you want to avoid exceeding the quota of pre-established resources. To prevent this, it is necessary to set some limitations on the package purchased by the user that prevent the limit of the included resources from being exceeded.
The possible limitations are: - Reduction of the maximum number of cloudlets per environment
- Reduction of the maximum number of nodes per environment
- Reduction of the physical space available for each node of the environment
Marketplace
Cloud Applications offers a Marketplace, where it is possible to select and install applications, add-ons, docker containers and CMS with a few simple steps. Our platform is a perfect service not only for developers but also for those involved in online commerce and content management. The user can in fact install a CMS in a few clicks and download pre-configured applications for Magento, PrestaShop, Open cart or WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Moodle and more. Also in the Marketplace the user can find templates for automatic clustering for many applications such as MySQL, WordPress, MongoDB, etc.
Autoscaling
The term indicates the ability of the system to automatically scale the application vertically and horizontally during peak loads (vertical and horizontal autoscaling). Traffic is distributed evenly with load balancing across multiple instances. This ensures high performance, speed, application availability and cost savings. Thanks to this system the user will not have to purchase expensive hardware to set up the servers.
Cloud Applications is a perfect service for those who want to reduce infrastructure costs, forget management issues, deploy apps but also manage content and e-commerce quickly and easily, taking advantage of Cloud scalability and flexibility.
