Jelastic Java Platform Set For Commercial Debut

Jelastic, a provider of Java platform as a service (PaaS) solutions, has announced that its namesake PaaS offering will emerge from beta and become commercially available in March.

Next month, Jelastic will become commercially available in North America from ServInt, and in Europe from dogado Internet GmbH – in collaboration with Host Europe. This move will make Jelastic available globally through a network of hosting partners, and capable of running and scaling Java applications with no lock-in or code changes required, the company said.

Jelastic announced its upcoming availability and pricing at the Parallels Summit 2012 on 16 February in Orlando, Florida.

Dynamic allocation

For its part, unlike other PaaS and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) options on the market, Jelastic offerings do not require users to select the machine size and pay for it, said Judah Johns, chief evangelist at Jelastic.

Instead, Jelastic dynamically allocates resources to scale application servers up and down to make sure they have the resources they need. This enables Jelastic’s hosting partners to charge users for the actual RAM and CPU consumption rather than for predefined machine size.

Customers benefit because the costs automatically go down when applications are off or not being used. Jelastic measures resources being consumed in “cloudlets” – one cloudlet is 128MB of RAM and has the processing power equivalent to a 200MHz CPU core. Today ServInt and dogado announced their commercial pricing: $0.02 per cloudlet per hour from ServInt, and 0.016 euro from dogado.

Jelastic has been in public beta testing both in North America and Europe since October of 2011, and has enjoyed strong growth during that time, reaching 10,000 beta testers.

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 the official commencement of their paid service. New customers joining after the official launch will benefit from the same free two-week trial period, after which paid service will automatically commence unless the service is cancelled.

Johns said Jelastic is also unique in that it does not require any application code changes, so developers can simply upload their Java package or specify the connection to their SVN or GIT code repository, and get their application running in the cloud in a few minutes with the ability to choose from multiple independent hosting providers around the world.

Commercial availability

“Since we publicly launched our beta in October last year, pricing and commercial availability have been the most popular questions we were getting from our users,” Dmitry Sotnikov, chief operating officer at Jelastic, said in a statement.

“Today we got to the major milestone with our first two partners – ServInt in the US and dogado in Europe – publicly announced a commercial availability timeframe as well as a revolutionary utility billing approach for the service. This is a major step in accomplishing our vision of zero-lock-in standards-based PaaS available to our users around the world.”

“Combining Jelastic’s cutting-edge technology with ServInt’s 17 years of hosting know-how has put us on a path to provide great things for our customers,” ServInt COO Christian Dawson, said in a statement. “We think the near-utility approach we’re taking with Jelastic on pricing and provisioning is going to break the platform as a service industry wide open. The product is miles ahead of its competitors on technological features, and now we’re adding game-changing, customer-friendly pricing to the mix. Jelastic is a truly revolutionary Cloud product, and we can’t wait to bring it to market in March.”

Meanwhile, Timo Mankartz, managing partner at dogado, said: “Holding true to our tradition of more than a decade, dogado Internet GmbH keeps its focus locked on new trends and emerging technologies. Centrepieces of our vision are cloud services, SaaS and IaaS solutions for mid-tier companies. Jelastic is one of only a few real cloud solutions on the market today. Harnessing Jelastic’s power, we offer dependable high-availability and fully automated load-balancing, combined with both vertically and horizontally scalable servers and resources.”]

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