News

Java-Based Cloud Provider Jelastic Adds Cloud Security Features

• By John K. Waters
• May 16, 2018

Cloud hosting platform provider Jelastic has released a new version of Jelastic Shield, with which the company adds a number of security enhancements to its evolving PaaS/IaaS platform. With this release the platform gets a new firewall management system, private network isolation, and other features based on customer feedback, the company said.

"The guarantee of security is considered as one of the main requirements among our cloud customers," said Jelastic CEO Ruslan Synytsky, in a statement, "and that’s why we keep improving the Jelastic platform in this direction, by adding private network isolation and enhanced functionality for firewall management."

Topping the list of new capabilities is the ability to manage inbound and outbound firewall rules on the container level via a graphical user interface. A number of default rules are automatically added to the inbound section to make the node operable, the company said.

There’s also a new private network isolation feature designed to prohibit any "unallowed" connections among different environments. This feature makes it possible for the user to create secure "environment groups" and isolate them from each other. "The platform automatically creates a dedicated IP set for each isolated group, which is composed of the appropriate containers’ internal addresses," the company explained, "which allows the user to control access between nodes of each environment."

The list of features in Jelastic Shield 5.4 also includes, among others, support for the Go language via the Golang application server stack; the possibility to add multiple extra environment layers and combine both Docker containers and Jelastic-managed stacks within a single environment; automation of environment lifecycle management with Webhooks to execute custom scripts before and/or after application deployment; a new option to choose among simultaneous and sequential modes when (re-)deploying or restarting multiple containers within a single node group, and the ability to select and remove multiple items within the Deployment Manager’s archive list at once; integration of web-based Guacamole client to access containers via SSH directly through the Jelastic dashboard; and support of unified commands for calling start, stop, and restart operations similarly within all dockerized software stacks.

The Palo Alto, CA-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.

A complete list of the Jelastic 5.4. release features, improvements, and bug fixes, along with detailed descriptions, is available on the release notes page.