News

Jelastic Adds Ruby Support to Platform-as-Infrastructure Update

• By John K. Waters
• June 11, 2014

Java/PHP-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider Jelastic has wrapped its arms around Ruby developers with the latest release of its evolving "Platform-as-Infrastructure" (PaI) environment.

PaI 2.2 expands the company's enterprise cloud and multi-language PaaS capabilities with what it's is calling "the industry's most comprehensive Ruby support." There's also a new API combined with a new GUI, which provides "improved simplicity for developers, and a one-click app marketplace."

For Rubyists, PaI 2.2 is a treasure chest. There's Jelastic's "Bring Your Own App" feature, which supports any Ruby app, version, or library engine, including Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, Rack, Ramaze, Exex.JS, all ruby gems, JRuby and GIT/SVN, without the need to change or recode -- which eliminates vendor lock-in. There's what Jelastic is calling "high-performance Ruby support," by which the company means support for the latest Ruby app servers with load balancing for the highest performance. (The company's example: fast, easy configuration of Unicorn, Puma or Passenger with NGINX via the GUI or API.) And there's Jelastic's support of full access to configuration files for performance tuning and customization.

"Enterprises need cloud solutions they can begin using on day one, not one thousand and one, or even one hundred and one," said Ruslan Synytsky, CTO of Jelastic, in a statement. "Supporting Java, PHP, and now Ruby continues our commitment to simplify development and deployment of applications in the cloud, providing immediate ROI for enterprises worldwide."

Along with the Ruby-specific features in this release, according to the company it also offers

•  Full programmatic access to a comprehensive API.
• The new One-Click App Marketplace, which currently offers more than 200 apps available for one-click set-up and deployment from Jelastic's GUI.
•  ISVs and hosting service providers can also use a Jelastic "widget" to provide one-click access to applications for The Jelastic widget, which allows ISVs to "capture customers earlier in the buying cycle and eliminates the time consuming task of marketing apps to hundreds of individual marketplaces."
• Added OpenShift Catridge support for Jetty8 and 9, JBoss 7, and Apache 2.2.
• New SSH support for remote programmatic access to servers.
•  Beta support for Python.
• Support for the Java Development Kit (JDK) 8.

Palo Alto, Calic.-based Jelastic was founded in 2010 by Hivetext, a Zhytomyr, Ukraine-based startup focused on Java application development in the cloud. Synytsky, who is also the founder, has said that his company's flagship platform was 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.

The company has been refining its original strategy and developing its PaI model of a combined PaaS and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) for about two years. In an IDC whitepaper ("Jelastic's Private Cloud PaaS Gains Momentum with Hosters") published earlier this year, analyst Al Hilwa profiled the company and this blending strategy, which he says is on the rise in the IaaS and PaaS markets. "By integrating PaaS and IaaS into their private and public cloud solution," he wrote, "Jelastic provides enterprises and hosters with a turnkey stack that provides rapid deployment and immediate ROI."

Jay Lyman, 451 Research Senior Analyst, sees "strong, growing demand among developers, IT operations, and DevOps teams to leverage multiple languages and multiple infrastructures without sacrificing time-to-market, quality or uptime," which is more or less what Jelastic is offering. "With today's market driving faster software development and deployment cycles, we expect the trend of polyglot programming and this demand to continue," he said in a statement.