News

Jelastic Adds Docker, Windows Container Support to Its Java-Based PaaS/IaaS Platform

• By John K. Waters
• April 6, 2015

Cloud hosting platform provider Jelastic has released a new version of its namesake PaaS/IaaS platform that includes production-ready Docker containers and support for Parallels Containers for Windows.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based Jelastic (short for Java Elastic), which was founded in 2010 by Hivetext, a Zhytomyr, Ukraine-based startup focused on Java application development in the cloud, bills itself as the only cloud company whose underlying platform is Java. Originally a Java-based Platform-as-a-Service provider, the company has been evolving a "Platform-as-Infrastructure" strategy that combines PaaS with Infrastructure-as-a-Service.

Jelastic's unlimited PaaS and container-based IaaS platform is designed to allow developers to deploy Java, PHP, Ruby, Node.js, Python, and .NET enterprise apps for private, public or hybrid cloud.

The Docker support in this new release adds the ability to create multi-container environments within the platform for different microservices based on Docker templates. "We noticed a high level of interest in containers from our customers, because it provides extreme flexibility for DevOps teams," said Ruslan Synytsky, CEO of Jelastic, in a blog post.

The platform supports Docker containers with a range of tools and capabilities, including: a visual environment topology builder for microservices based on containers; smart clustering automation features for complex apps; automatic vertical and horizontal scaling; deployment automation capabilities across multiple containers; high availability of containers on the hardware level (based on software defined storage); smart containers distribution across the hardware cluster; link support among containers on multiple hardware nodes; and a built-in toolset for monitoring and managing container resources.

The enterprise version of the platform includes CoreOS Enterprise Registry, an on-premises Docker registry. CoreOS is a lightweight, open-source operating system based on the Linux kernel. Future releases are expected to include integration of the Rocket container technology from CoreOS

Also getting a lot of attention in this release: new support for .NET/Windows on top of the Parallels Containers for Windows virtualization solution. Jelastic users can now host web services running on the Windows OS inside the cloud. The platform supports: Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS) 8.0; SQL Server 2012 (Express); Windows VPS server with the pure Windows Server 2012 OS (and 2008 version optionally installed); and Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).

This release of the platform also supports WebSockets, which has been integrated with the Jelastic Shared Load Balancer. It comes with containers of GlassFish 4 and WildFly 8, support of Internationalized Domain Names and Generic Top-Level Domains, and some third party add-ons.

Last year, James Gosling (the Father of Java) and Brazilian Java community leader Bruno F Souza joined the company's platform advisory team. "I love the way the Jelastic weaves together so many powerful technologies," Gosling said in a statement. "It provides a very high-level, comprehensible interface that significantly eases cloud deployments. Especially cool, the seamless integration between private and public clouds."

The company considers this release to be a milestone on the road to "entirely multilingual hosting." 451 Research Senior Analyst Jay Lyman has said that he 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." In a 2014 white paper IDC analyst Al Hilwa noted the company's PaaS-combined-with-IaaS strategy: "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."