Aptana Cloud - new details

Not so long ago, we already wrote , and were the first to report on the launch of a new platform for the organization of Cloud Computing - Aptana Cloud. For details, I refer you to the first publication, and today we will continue the conversation. Although I signed up for the beta testing program, I haven’t received an invitation yet. But one of the Western bloggers (Dougal Matthews) still got him and wrote a review of first impressions . Based on it today, we will describe what to expect from this platform. As soon as I personally get access to testing, I will definitely write my impressions and comments.

The first thing we learned (or rather, the guesses from the press release were confirmed) is that the system is aimed at quickly creating and deploying applications that are not particularly critical to computing in a scalable Web 2.0 infrastructure. That is, the emphasis is on simplicity and speed, often to the detriment of other parties. It’s kind of good — full support from its own IDE, the deployment and management / monitoring tools built into it, on the other, the versatility inherent in heavier solutions like Amazon EC is lost.

By the way, it seems that the differences between the offers from Aptana and Amazon are even more different in their essence and approach to that very Cloud. If Amazon offers virtualization completely OS and you choose and collect your environment, and it provides only the environment for your environment and the allocation of the necessary resources, Aptana has much more similarity with a very specific version of VDS hosting. Why - look further.
')
When creating a project, we must choose our tariff plan. The structure of the already included services and tools includes: Apache 2 web server, MySQL 5.0.51 database (this is better than many hosting sites, but I would still like to see either the latest version of the 5.1 line or the ability to install your own), PHP 5.2.5 (This is great news, at the time of testing it was the latest version, now it is already 5.2.6) with the main extensions, including cURL, iMagick, openssl, mysqli, PDO, SOAP, SPL, XML-RPC. Most likely, PHP is installed as mod_php5 to the web server. In addition, we have pre-installed tools for working with the database, tools for monitoring and keeping statistics, even the statistics of attendance of our application using Google Analytics. In addition to all this, we have Subversion (along with the module for Apache) and our own application server Aptana Jaxer (version 0.9.8), about which I wrote more in my blog .



All this “good” works, based on the phpinfo () information, on the SunOS operating system on the x86 platform.

Now what concerns the tariff plans. We can choose from several configured plans that include limitations on RAM and disk space: 256 RAM / 5 GB, 512 RAM / 10 GB, 1024 RAM / 15 GB, 2048 RAM / 25 GB. The traffic in all plans is the same - 5 TB per month (yes, yes, exactly 5 terabytes), and the processor power is scaled depending on the application needs, up to a maximum of about 95% of the 8th processor server.

Technical support services are included in the standard package, but you can pay extra for faster and round-the-clock service, with a standard promise to respond within one hour during business time.

Access to your Cloud (probably it would be more correct to say the cloud, although depending on the settings it may be so), the standard is limited to 1 administrator and 1 developer, or you order the option of an unlimited number of employees to work with the system.

And now about the prices. The most minimal package, 256 RAM / 5GB + all standard settings will cost 0.99USD per day or 30 per month. The maximum package is already more expensive and will be 8.22 USD per day. Despite the limitations on the amount of memory, if traffic consumption and CPU time are critical for your application, then such a proposal may be more profitable than having your own server or renting a VPS of similar parameters.

Of course, it should be noted that this is the earliest beta version of the service, and the final proposal may change something, for example, the composition of the environment (they promise to add at least RubyOnRails development), and the cost can be adjusted. I would like to see flexible tariff plans, in terms of memory consumption. The author of the test rightly notes that while there is no possibility to develop and test one version of the application, while the other one works, that is, you are either developing or using the Cloud for production version. I would like to see the possibility of running two versions of the application inside one machine.

Of the undoubted advantages, I would, as before, single out the ease of deployment and close integration with the IDE, which makes the Aptana offer a competitor even to regular hosting. If reliability and scalability are at the level, this service can be used to support already quite serious and demanding applications. Especially if it will be possible to work with several clouds (that is, you can order several configurations for yourself and distribute tasks between them, organizing a cluster of clouds, as it were). So we are waiting for the opportunity to independently test this environment and then there will be a more detailed report.

PS Initially I wrote for my blog , but I think it will be interesting for habrazhiteli, given the many responses and the popularity of the announcement of this technology on Habré.