With the Canadian dollar on the decline and the high cost of popular US-based PaaS providers like Heroku, we are finding that more and more Canadian based SaaS providers, agency development shops and IT departments are on the lookout for an alternative solution that provide similar functionality at a lower cost.
You do not have to look very far. It is no secret that we are huge fans of our partner, Cloud 66. Cloud 66 provides full stack container management-as-a-service. What does this mean? Cloud 66 is DevOps-as-a-service and it provides you with everything you need to deploy, scale and protect your applications on a number of approved public clouds, including Cloud-A.
Let’s take a look at how Cloud 66 + Cloud-A stacks up against Heroku.
Deployment on Servers of your choice
While Heroku is heavily integrated with Amazon Web Services and provides no alternative cloud providers, Cloud 66 has partnered with eight global and regional pub clouds to provide choice to the users. In addition to this, Cloud 66 allows you to deploy your applications on your own servers within your own data centre.
This makes Cloud 66 an ideal choice for Multi Cloud deployments. Cloud 66 failover groups provides a managed quick response DNS address that automatically follows your stack web endpoints. You can create and connect to two stacks at any time, one primary and one backup, on two different public cloud providers – reducing the risk of having all of your eggs in one basket. Should there ever be a need to switch traffic between the two stacks, you can flip a switch to direct traffic to the alternative stack – a process that typically takes about 5 minutes.
Feature Rich
Heroku has gained popularity for the simplicity it provides for deploying application to the cloud. The features Heroku provides reduces the amount of Ops work that is required to deploy elastic and scalable apps.
We are happy to report that Cloud 66 is also extremely feature rich, and makes it very simple to deploy your apps to the cloud.
Once you have linked your Git repository to Cloud 66, Cloud 66 analyzes your code and builds a customer deployment in Docker containers – a process that take up to a minute. Once the code has been analyzed, you are prompted to select where you would like you deploy your app. Your choice is any of the eight approved public clouds (including Cloud-A) or your own servers. You can select your server specs from here as well. After you answer a few questions about how you would like your database configured and which ports you would like opened, Cloud 66 goes through the deployment process which takes up to 20 minutes.
Once your application is deployed you have free range to implement a number of powerful, automated features that include managed or unmanaged backups, firewall management, load balancing, auto-scaling, monitoring, failover groups and much much more.
Open Container Technology
Of course, being the open source junkies that we are here at Cloud-A, we cannot help but note that Cloud 66 uses non-proprietary, open source Docker container technology for deployments. This reduces the amount of technology lock-in you have with your deployments with Cloud 66. This is in comparison to Heroku’s proprietary container technology that they use for their deployments, which makes it difficult and expensive to displace Heroku should you ever decide to leave.
Since the automation and management layer that Cloud 66 provides is separate from your Infrastructure-as-a-service account, you still have full control over your servers, whereas with Heroku the Platform-as-a-service layer is tightly coupled with the Infrastructure-as-a-service layer.
Cost
It has been noted in the industry that one of the drawbacks is its cost. Let’s take a look at the following example comparing Heroku pricing to Cloud 66 and Cloud-A for a 1 application server and 1 database server deployment.
Heroku Specs
| 1x Performance M (2.5GB RAM) | $250 USD/Month |
| 1x Premium 0 Heroku PostGres (1GB RAM, 64GB storage) | $200 USD/Month |
Total cost in CAD ($1 USD = $0.76 CAD) = $595.19 CAD
Cloud 66 + Cloud-A Specs
| 1x 4GB VM (app server) | $60 CAD/Month |
| 1x 1GB VM (DB) = $25CAD | $25 CAD/Month |
| 64GB SSD Volume (DB) | $16 CAD/Month |
| 2 Server deployment & Managed Backups with Cloud 66 | $48.40 USD/Month |
Total cost in CAD ($1 USD = $0.76 CAD) = $165.02 CAD (Over 70% cost savings)
Get Started
Getting started is as easy as signing up for a Cloud-A account, as well as a Cloud 66 account. When you create your first stack on Cloud 66, you will authenticate to your Cloud-A account.