News

Cloud Hoster Jelastic Adds HA for Java Apps

• By John K. Waters
• January 20, 2012

For Java developers working on the nascent Jelastic Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), it now requires just a mouse click to activate new automated high availability (HA) features for their applications, the company announced. With that click, the Jelastic platform clusters each app server with another app server running on a separate virtual machine (VM), and replicates the sessions between them, explained the company's founder and CEO Ruslan Synytsky.

The result: If one app server fails (or is down for maintenance or a software upgrade), another takes its place, running off the stored sessions shared by the cluster. The "cluster companions" get the sessions from the failed machine and the CPU and RAM necessary to serve them. This new HA feature also automatically enables cookie-based (sticky) sessions, which, the company claims, "ensures the resiliency that underpins high availability infrastructure."

Jelastic is a cloud hosting platform designed for hosted service providers. It runs any Java application in the cloud, the company says, without code or language changes, and without the need to write for specific APIs. It supports any JVM-based application, including apps developed with Java 6, Java 7, JRuby, Scala and Groovy. The Jelastic platform supports three SQL databases: MariaDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL. It also provides non-SQL database support for MongoDB and CouchDB. And its list of support app servers includes Tomcat (6 and 7), GlassFish and Jetty. Jelastic provides its users with developer tools through plug-ins for the Apache Maven and Apache Ant.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup was founded in 2010, by Hivetext, a Zhytomyr, Ukraine-based startup focused on Java application development in the cloud.

Ruslan Synytsky, founder and CEO of Jelastic, claims that his company's flagship platform is the first Java PaaS to provide "full application compatibility and developer control," and "the only choice for Java developers" who want to avoid lock-in.

"Successful developers spend their time writing code and building cutting-edge technology," Synytsky said in a statement. "They do not spend all day managing and configuring servers and worrying about infrastructure issues."

The Jelastic platform has been in test since mid-2011, and the beta is now available free to U.S. Java developers through its new partner, Web hoster ServInt. The platform is available in Europe through another partner, Host Europe. The company claims more than 1,500 registered Jelastic developers have deployed nearly 1,000 applications since mid-2011.