2021-12-18

Coolest PaaS/IaaS I've ever use: Jelastic

So, I'm looking an simplest deployment strategy for my next side project, I don't want to use Kubernetes since I'm all alone XD, learning Nomad, WayPoint, Swarm, and other popular tool to make it easy like Portainer, but why they doesn't make it just as simple as Vercel or Fly.io). Also don't want to use big cloud providers (GCP, AWS, Azure, etc) which the UI quite sucks like everything developed by different team with lack of communication and you have to do a lot of setup hassle just to deploy simple things. Then I found a really cool product called Jelastic, that fit my needs:
  1. Can autoscale out (like AWS ELB/ECS, GCR, ACS, etc) and auto-clustering (as easy as CloudSQL or AWS RDS/Aurora, but can be automatic)
  2. Can autoscale up '__') without downtime, only took 1 second to scale up from 1 core 640MB to 16 core 32GB (seems like they only changing container's resource quota limit) but you can see the changes directly without restart
  3. Can deploy VPS on the same cluster/network (for my databases, since I don't use "standard/popular" databases) and it's super cheap (it only took 3.9$ per month to deploy a VPS with 1 static IP, and can autoscale up), you only need to pay what you utilize (CPU and RAM usage), not charged 100% when server up unlike other VPS providers
  4. The UI doesn't sucks XD you can WebSSH, normal SSH (as long as have real IP), easy SSL setup, super easy to change config, the lacking part about Jelastic probably configfile/gitops-based setup (for working with multiple members in the future) at least there's API and CLI to create and modify environment, not sure if there's auditing available (haven't checked yet). 
  5. Can also deploy automatically from git (checked every N minutes) or CI pipeline or using CLI.
  6. Easy to move (live migration) to different providers, change ownership of a cluster, or if it's not enabled, at least there's no vendor locking, you can also manually export and import environment (for example copying staging setup to production has similar architecture just different deployment branch and scaling strategy).


Other cool things that I won't use: deploying any-container/docker-based with easy steps, deploying kubernetes, bunch of stack in marketplace provided (may vary on different provider).

For 3.9$ (if you utilize only 1%) per month (16 core, 32GB RAM, 200 GB NVMe VPS, 1 static IP, provider: ToggleBox), you can get the greenest (highest on average) result among all VPS I've ever tried:


You can see the raw benchmark result here and recap here.

What's the catch?
  1. It's quite expensive if you utilize 100% (around 339$ if you use ToggleBox for the specs above), for comparison:
    1. cheapest highest spec Contabo's VPS (9 core, 60GB RAM, 1.5TB SSD) unmetered bandwidth only cost $55-ish per month (not apple-to-apple since it's different spec and performance, also this is what you should pay per month regardless your utilization)
    2. similar spec GCE n1-custom-16-32768 (16 core, 32GB, 200GB SSD) non-committed, cost $525 excluding bandwidth
    3. similar spec AWS EC2 a1.xlarge (16 core, 32GB RAM, 200GB gp2 SSD) on-demand, only cost  $317 excluding bandwidth
    4. similar spec Azure F16s (16 core, 32GB RAM, 256GB SSD) pay-as-you-go, cost $634 excluding bandwidth
    5. cheapest OVH on SG (8 core. 64GB RAM, 400GB SSD) only cost $135 with unmetered 200Mbps bandwidth
    but still, this is way cheaper for minimum usage than if you use GCR you will be billed around ~$10 per month for idle instance, or ~$37 for standby instance (for 1 VCPU, 1 GB RAM, not including bandwidth that quite pricey $0.085)
  2. Some provider have different "free" tier, for example ToggleBox give free 2GB bandwidth per hour (GCR only give free 1GB per month XD), some other provider give free 1 static IP, some other provider give free 10GB disk usage per hour, etc.
  3. License might be pricey if you install it on your own cluster instead of using the already provided (eg. DewaCloud or CloudKilat for Indonesia region, ToggleBox for US region, etc), but they have profit sharing model if you are a reseller (have your own VPS and rent it).
  4. The billing is hourly (so you will always billed at minimum 1 cloudlet -- specs of 1 cloudlet can be vary per provider), compared to for example GCR that use second as minimum billing resolution (VCPU, GB RAM, Requests, and Bandwidth).


That's it for now, I'll create a new post if I found something better.