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dotCloud provides faster, more reliable PaaS with Google Cloud Platform
Friday, December 5, 2014
Today’s guest blog comes from Philipp Strube, founder and CEO at
cloudControl
, a Berlin-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider. CloudControl provides the dotCloud Platform, which simplifies the deployment, management and scaling of web apps for developers. Launching today, the new version of dotCloud will run on
Google Compute Engine
, giving their customers a number of performance benefits as well as cost savings in the range of 50-80 percent.
CloudControl acquired
dotCloud
, the industry’s first multi-language PaaS, in August. At that time, we updated the underlying dotCloud technology and took the opportunity to pick the best technology vendors to work with dotCloud going forward. As this is our first foray into the U.S., we wanted to differentiate ourselves in this market by giving customers the fastest, most reliable service. And to do this, we needed to run on the highest-performing infrastructure, so we made the decision to move all of dotCloud’s 500 customers from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to Google Cloud Platform.
When you are a developer making architectural decisions, it’s important to have options. That’s why we picked Google. With Google Cloud Platform and dotCloud, customers get options -- the choice of programming languages like Java, Scala, Clojure, NodeJS, PHP, Python, Ruby, and many more via industry standard buildpacks, and
add-on services
for relational databases, including
Google Cloud SQL
, NoSQL databases like MongoDB and in-memory solutions like Memcache and Redis, just to name a few. App developers also get the popular Git-based PaaS workflow, the flexibility to pick the right technology for their use-cases and the scalability and reliability of Google’s infrastructure, without having to maintain development, staging and production environments themselves.
Google Cloud Platform offers an unparalleled global network infrastructure that lays the foundation for a robust and growing ecosystem, enabling developers to connect with partners and services anywhere. Our promise to developers building on top of the dotCloud PaaS is that they always have a platform they can trust. Google Cloud Platform gives us the flexible, reliable and fast infrastructure we require to fulfill this promise.
In addition to the performance benefits of Google Compute Engine, we are also pleased with the reliability and redundancy of
Google Cloud Storage
. To make sure customer applications are always available and can scale fast to meet current demand, the platform uses a robust and proven zero-downtime deployment process. First, during a push to the Git repository, the language and framework-specific buildpack runs and builds an image of the application code, its dependencies and any additional assets required. The compressed image is then stored on Google Cloud Storage. This ensures that the latest image is always available to either replace a container, scale to more containers, or deploy a new version in a matter of seconds.
Initially bootstrapping our technology on Google Cloud Platform took just a week, and preparing the platform for production took about six to eight weeks in total. The move was painless for us because our technology architecture is built from the ground up to be infrastructure agnostic by using containers. All customer application processes and 98 percent of our own platform components run inside the containers. We use n1-highmem-4 VMs to run the containers on.
We also benefitted from the fact that Google provides powerful, well understood abstractions on top of the raw compute, networking and storage infrastructure that were intuitive to use. The pricing model of our PaaS platform is completely consumption-based so customers only pay for what they used. To be able to provide this we rely on the underlying infrastructure pricing to match this. With the sustained usage pricing discounts from Google, we have a cost-effective way to bake in enough headroom for customers to scale instantly without upfront commitments. This allowed us to reduce the per-memory prices by 50-80 percent for customers who migrate from the old dotCloud services running on AWS to the new dotCloud infrastructure running on Google Cloud Platform.
With today’s launch we are also re-introducing a free tier and invite both existing dotCloud customers, as well as new developers, to
try out the next dotCloud
on Google Compute Engine.
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