Jelastic Announces Commercial Launch and Utility Pricing Model

At the 2012 Parallels Summit, Jelastic announced its Platform as a Service offering of the same name will exit beta and become generally available in March 2012. Geared toward Java applications, Jelastic is offered through the U.S. and German hosting partners ServInt and dogado respectively. Jelastic’s availability through hosting partners means that customers need not manage complex installations of the Jelastic PaaS platform. In a manner similar to AWS, customers can deploy a new cloud environment in seconds with a few clicks of the mouse. Jelastic’s configuration technology handles automated connections between a customer’s server instances and the software stack selected within the hosting environment.

Key features of Jelastic include the following:

• Capability to “run and scale any Java application with no code changes required.”
• The flexibility to select customized software stack groupings such as Tomcat, Glassfish, Jetty and JBoss Java application servers and SQL (MariaDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL) or NoSQL (MongoDB, CouchDB) database platforms.
• A utility pricing model that charges on the basis of RAM and CPU consumption instead of machine size.
• Pricing in units of 128 MB, called cloudlets, of $0.02 per cloudlet per hour from ServInt, and 0.016 euro per cloudlet per hour from dogado.
• Ease of deployment including no installation and autoscaling.

Jelastic’s utility pricing model is revolutionary within the PaaS landscape and leverages its technology for automatically allocating resources in relation to consumption, allowing partners Servint and dogado to charge for usage alone. ServInt COO Christian Dawson commented on Jelastic’s utility pricing model by noting: “We think the near-utility approach we’re taking with Jelastic on pricing and provisioning is going to break the platform-as-a-service industry wide open. The product is miles ahead of its competitors on technological features, and now we’re adding game-changing, customer-friendly pricing to the mix.” Jelastic Beta customers will enjoy two weeks of free service following the March launch date for the paid service.

Jelastic’s announcement comes days after CloudBees revealed details of AnyCloud, which allows customers to deploy the AnyCloud PaaS across multiple hosting environments. Meanwhile, ActiveState’s Stackato recently announced a new release featuring the ability to deploy applications to private and public clouds as the battle for market share in the PaaS space intensifies.