Following on from the arrival of Cloud Bees, the Java PaaS market looks to be hotting up nicely with the imminent emergence from Beta test status of Jelastic, a Palo Alto, California, based startup making a Java server hosting platform for developers and hosting service providers.
The company claims is the only PaaS offering designed specifically for hosting service providers to deploy and make available to their customers. It will become commercially available in March in both North America - from ServInt - and in Europe from dogado Internet GmbH in Germany, in collaboration with Host Europe. The company is on the look out for other hosting businesses to partner with.
Both ServInt and Host Europe are partners of Parallels, and Jelastic used the recent Parallels Summit in Orlando, Florida, to announce its pricing structure.
The Jelastic business model ducks the normal demand for users to select the machine size and pay for it. Instead, it dynamically allocates resources instantaneously. It can scale application servers up and down, to ensure they have the resources needed. This enables hosting partners to charge users for actual resource consumption rather than for a pre-defined machine size. This means costs automatically go down when applications are off or not being used.
Jelastic measures consumed resources in `Cloud lets’, where one Cloud let is 128 MB of RAM and processing power equivalent to 200MHz CPU core. The new commercial prices are: $0.02 per Cloud let per hour from ServInt, and €0.016 from dogado.
One aspect of the Jelastic environment which should appeal to existing developers of Java applications is that it does not require changes to application code to deploy a existing application in the Cloud . Developers can either upload their Java packages or specify connection to the SVN or GIT code repository. The company claims that applications can be running in the Cloud in a few minutes, with no lock-in and the ability to choose from any hosting provider around the world.
Since the Beta program launched last October some 10,000 beta testers have joined it. Both ServInt and dogado will continue to offer the product at no cost until the March launch date, at which point all users will enjoy a two-week extension of their free beta, followed by official commencement of the paid service.
