Cloud 66 vs. Heroku – A Detailed Comparison & Business Case

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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.

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Cloud-A Backup Methods

At Cloud-A, we have opted to allow our users to design their own backup strategies for their Cloud-A VMs, using whatever backup solution our users are comfortable with, since backups are not a one-size fits all solution. Application servers, database servers and file servers all have different uptime requirements, durability, and loss acceptance. With that said, we quite often get asked what backup software we see used most often on our Cloud through interactions with our users. Here is a list of backup software tried and tested by our users to help you decide on the best backup strategy for your Cloud-A stacks.

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Introducing Cloud-A for Teams

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You have spoken and we have delivered! After extensive user feedback that included focus groups, surveys and interviews, we have released v1.0 of Cloud-A for teams. This is a free functionality that will allow Cloud-A user account admins to invite their project team members and issue roles with varying access capabilities. We see this functionality working especially well for:

Development and Operations teams

Where multiple team members are working on different projects and/or clients. Each team member will have their own username and password, rather than sharing one set of credentials for an entire team. Having identified that many development teams have limited operations resources, we feel that this is a step in the right direction towards marrying Dev and Ops together into one, unified and collaborative team. 

Service providers

Some clients are self-sufficient and can perform several dashboard related tasks themselves.

Cloud-A team functionality will provide service providers with a great amount of flexibility, allowing their clients to have varying amounts of access to their Cloud-A infrastructure for these tasks.

Contractors

Teams will have the ability to create accounts for independent contractors or specialists who need dashboard access for a given project temporarily. No longer will you have to share your username, password and billing information with resources external to your company.

Here is a tutorial on how to use the new team functionality.  

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Deploy a Gitlab Server on Cloud-A with Cloud 66 and Docker

This quick start guide will show how to setup & configure a docker based Gitlab git repository platform in just minutes!

Gitlab allows development teams to create, review and deploy code together and has integrations for tons of tools such as Slack, Hipchat, LDAP, JIRA, Jenkins, many types of hooks and a complete API.

Gitlab is a great first step in building out your continuous integration / deployment and test/dev environments on Cloud-A.

What you will need before you get started :

  • Cloud-A account (free $10+ trial here) – Canada’s Favourite Public Cloud Provider
  • Cloud 66 account (free 14 day trial here) – Highly recommended Container management-as-a-Service Partner

How the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is a Game Changer for Cloud Computing

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Yesterday, the Linux Foundation announced the newly formed Cloud Native Computing Foundation – a Linux foundation collaborative project backed by industry giants like AT&T, Box, Cisco, Docker and many more. In addition to this announcement, Google has also announced that it has donated it’s Kubernetes container technology to the foundation, just days after announcing its support for the OpenStack foundation for the sake of advancing container technology. As advocates and users of container based technology and cloud native applications, we at Cloud-A are really excited about this string of announcements and the affect it will have on the adoption of modern, container based, cloud aware technology.

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3 Ways Modern Cloud Computing Promotes Innovation

With fear that Canada was lagging in the adoption of leading edge technology and missing out on major economic benefit as a result, Cloud-A was launched with the goal of promoting the use of modern cloud technology within Canada and accelerating innovation in both private and public sectors.

The true opportunity with modern Cloud infrastructure like Cloud-A is not necessarily with the migration of existing applications and platforms, but the developer greenfield that it provides.

Here are 3 ways that Cloud-A and modern Cloud Computing can help organizations Innovate.

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Test/Dev in the Cloud

We often get questions from prospective customers who aren’t familiar with the public cloud model on whether Cloud-A is better suited for test/dev environments or production environments. The answer is both. Cloud-A is built on the same enterprise class server and storage hardware that many enterprise organizations run internally, thus making it more than suitable for production environments. The utility billing model allows users to access their systems on the same enterprise class hardware, but only pay for it when they are using it, also making it an ideal and cost effective test/dev environment.

Here is a look at the benefits of using Cloud-A for testing, development and QA environments:

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3 Cloud Migration Strategies you Should Consider

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1. Lift and Shift

The Lift and Shift cloud migration technique includes migrating an existing application to a modern cloud platform as is, with very little modification to the architecture of the application. Because the architecture of the existing application was likely architected for its original host, the application might fail to take advantage of the features and benefits of the new cloud platform.

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Benefits

  • Minimal development work ($)

Drawbacks

  • Performance concerns
  • Reliability concerns
  • Missing the benefits of elastic cloud resources
  • Higher cost of management over time

2. Hybrid Partitioning

Hybrid partitioning includes partitioning the individual components of an application and spanning them across a combination of both private infrastructure and public cloud infrastructure. The idea is to limit the amount of dSimplify the Cloud with Cloud-A & Cloud 66 Webinarevelopment  work required, by migrating the highly scalable, highly transactional components of an application to public cloud resources to take advantage of the elasticity and utility billing, but keeping the less scalable components (think Oracle databases) on their original host.

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Benefits

  • Best of both worlds (public and private cloud)
  • Components on the Public cloud resources can scale up and down on demand
  • Less development work than than totally refactoring an app

Drawbacks

  • More development and testing work than Lift and Shift ($$)
  • Possible latency concerns
  • Not a fit for every application

3. Refactor

Refactoring an application includes a complete rewrite of the code, so that the application becomes “cloud aware” and can take advantage of the benefits of elastic, scalable, API driven public cloud infrastructure. Since this strategy is essentially going back to the drawing board, the app can be re-written with modern application architecture best practices like decoupling components and utilizing distributed microservices for enhanced reliability and performance.

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Benefits

  • Scale resources on demand
  • Costs scale with demand
  • Increased application resiliency
  • Increased performance

Drawbacks

  • Requires the most development and testing work ($$$)

More Information

For more information on cloud migrations and other considerations for public cloud adoption, check out our whitepaper titled: Public Cloud Adoption in the Enterprise.

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This whitepaper outlines

    • Best practices for faster time to value
    • Keys to developer adoption
    • Application considerations
    • Handling internal politics
    • Budgetary considerations
    • Achieving executive buy-in

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