March 5 — Jelastic, Inc., today announced the launch of a major new version of its ultra-scalable and interoperable Java and PHP cloud hosting platform. The new version, Jelastic 1.9, features a flexible new pricing model, FTP support, caching in NGINX and the latest versions of software stacks (including TomEE and MariaDB 10.0.0).

Version 1.9 builds on the formidable strengths of the globally available and widely recognized Jelastic PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) platform. The platform, initially launched in October 2011, has more than 40,000 users, and is being offered by hosting partners in the United States, UK, Brazil, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Russia and Japan. It has won the highest Java prize, the Duke's Choice Award from Oracle, due to its fundamentally new approach to cloud hosting of Java applications.

While other platforms impose limitations on developers by forcing them to code to specific APIs and adapt their applications to various constraints, Jelastic maximizes convenience for its users. Uploading and deploying an app on Jelastic takes only a few minutes, since the platform is standards-based and can run virtually any Java or PHP application without any code changes.

Moreover, Jelastic can automatically scale any application. As soon as an application´s load grows, the platform simply makes additional resources available to it. When the load goes down again, the platform reduces the resources.

"Today Jelastic is introducing a significant update with a revolutionary pricing model which was explicitly designed for production applications and for large scaling," said Jelastic CEO Ruslan Synytsky. "We have added major discounts for reserved resources, as well as discounts for volume usage. These discounts allow developers to host their production apps at a reasonable price. We have also added support of new software stacks such as TomEE 1.5 and MariaDB 10. These projects are extremely innovative, and Jelastic is the only PaaS to drive these kinds of innovations to the community. And we allow developers to test these great products in just a few clicks."

The newly launched Jelastic 1.9 offers the following useful new features and improvements for developers and hosting service providers:

For Java and PHP developers:

• Volume discounts with reserved and dynamic resources: Jelastic´s automatic vertical scaling provides an application with exactly the amount of RAM and CPU it needs, and reclaims those resources when the application no longer needs them. This allows Jelastic to offer a revolutionary pricing model in which users only pay for what they use. With the introduction of Jelastic 1.9, developers can now choose the reserved and autoscaling limits for their applications and get the corresponding volume discounts in return. The higher the resource consumption is, the lower base price the customer gets. This is ideal for large-scale applications and production use.
• Easier access to application files with FTP/FTPS: The new version of the platform offers support for the FTP/FTPS protocol. This provides a fast, easy, and reliable way of file sharing and data transfer to and from servers in Jelastic environments.
• Higher performance through file caching: Jelastic 1.9 supports caching in NGINX (for both NGINX-balancer and NGINX PHP server). This improves performance by reducing the access time to the resource and increasing the resource building speed.
• More enterprise-ready servers with built-in TomEE: The new version adds Apache TomEE, the enterprise edition of Apache Tomcat, to meet demand for a more enterprise-ready server. This provides application developers with the best technology stack that can be deployed to a simple Java EE container. TomEE is a full-blown app server, but retains the simplicity of Tomcat and avoids architectural overhead.
• More databases with MariaDB 10.0: Jelastic 1.9 is the first PaaS offering MariaDB 10.0, the most advanced database in the SQL world. This database offers developers the advantages of multi-source replication, dynamic columns, and MariaDB Galera Cluster. It is even faster and more fault tolerant, and has more flexible database replication, than previous MariaDB versions.

For hosting providers:

• Powerful business analytics: Jelastic 1.9 ships with an advanced reporting console that lets hosters see and analyze all aspects of their PaaS business and customer behavior, including conversion process, churn rate, activity rate, feature popularity, revenue per customer, and much more. This helps hosting companies not just provide the technology but successfully manage and evolve their cloud businesses.
• Log management: A new log management system provides a wide range of benefits. It stores and indexes Jelastic logs and provides a browser-based user interface that the hosting provider's support team can use to effectively support their Jelastic customers. Among other things, it lets the team easily view the current state of the services, see the result of changes made, subscribe for email notification, and so on. This allows faster and more flexible detection and resolution of problems.
• Simple software upgrades: Hosting providers can benefit from the new version's support for building templates from RPMs. It ensures simple upgrade of software inside a container, and makes it possible to perform one-click installation of custom applications inside a container. Pre-installed templates are no longer needed.
• Improved security: The new version adds HTTPS for database administration web pages, so the links to such web pages from Jelastic dashboard will be secure if SSL is switched on for the environment where the requested database is added.
• Multiple improvements in administration tools: A new set of JCA (Jelastic Cluster Admin) features provides capabilities including smart live migration, dashboard customization, funding history for billing users and logging for actions. System monitoring, tariffs management, troubleshooting administration issues and generating statistical reports became even more convenient.

About Jelastic

Jelastic, Inc., based in Palo Alto, Calif., offers a Java and PHP server hosting platform for developers and hosting service providers. Jelastic is the only Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering designed specifically for hosting service providers to deploy and make available to their customers. Jelastic automatically scales Java and PHP applications and allocates server resources, thus delivering true next-generation Java and PHP cloud computing. 

-----

Source: Jelastic