Switching to Platform.sh can help IT/DevOps organizations drive 219% ROI
Organizations, the ultimate way to manage your users and projects
Note: This article is an English translation from the original article from Antoine Crochet Damais in JournalduNet. Read the original French version.
Launched in 2014 by Commerce Guys, Platform.sh offers a container based Platform as a Service (PaaS). One year on, this French company has proved its success; 250 customers in Europe and the Americas.
Cloud hosting built entirely around logical (LXC) based containers, Platform.sh was launched in May 2014 by the French open source software company, Commerce Guys. A year later, it seems the proof of concept has come of age; to date Commerce Guys claims at least 250 live customers on its PaaS. References include several renowned French brands; SeLoger.com, Drupal based websites and all its content sits on Platform.sh. Parc Asterix uses Platform.sh for all its web-sites, as well as Drupal Commerce (the Drupal distribution for e -commerce built by Commerce Guys and active across 60,000 sites world-wide), which the leisure park uses to fulfill online ticket sales and customer service.
Several well-known international references already
Platform.sh is being used internationally. Commerce Guys highlights eCommerce sites belonging to the British based global retailer Reiss, and the German coach operator, Flixbus. And that’s not all, because Platform.sh is being selected as the preferred hosting choice by many of the largest web-sites on the American continent. This is already the case for customers in the United States and also Latin America, where the Platform.sh PaaS supports the largest Colombian newspaper’s sites (La Patria), and the largest Ecuadorian newspaper, El Universo. Combined, these sites regularly experience in excess of 50 million unique visitors per month.
The strength of Platform.sh : automated testing, automated deployment, and seamless scalability
It must be said that most of the features being offered claimed by Platform.sh are extremely enticing. Hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), this cloud offering is underpinned by a container based infrastructure inspired directly by the well known Docker; an infrastructure that allows a much lighter architecture, more granularity if needed (micro- services), and especially more flexibility than conventional virtualization services. Commerce Guys also highlights another strength: Continuous Iintegration (CI) capabilities. Platform.sh incorporates a management capability (based on Git ) that allows cloning of sites, infrastructure and web applications, in order to run several parallel development streams if needed.
Extending Platform.sh into Java, Python , Ruby, Node.JS
“We have recently integrated the Blackfire.io code analysis tool from SensioLabs. It checks whether or not code being generated affects or slows down the application in any way,” said Frederic Plais , CEO of Commerce Guys . More recently, Platform.sh also built a seamless integration with bitbucket, the GitHub competitor. “It is now possible to fully manage its code submissions, branches, and deployments through bitbucket “ continues Frédéric Plais. “Although it is less known than GitHub , this service is growing fast. It has 3 million users each day.” But Platform.sh is also integrated with GitHub, leveraging GitHub Connect.
On the Roadmap, the option of deploying on multiple infrastructure clouds
“The size of the contracts that we are picking up each month is steadily rising, with monthly growth rates two or three percentage points,” says the Commerce Guys’ co-founder. “We are now looking to establish ourselves as a global cloud platform of European origin.” In order to fulfill its ambitions, the Paris based company concluded a third round to the tune of 5.3 million euros in 2014, in order to redouble their R&D efforts. His stated goal: to expand its PaaS to new environments to attract more developers. Currently limited to PHP, with the key implementations of Symfony, Drupal and Magento, Platform.sh support will soon extend to Java, Python, Ruby, and Node.js. This is what Frederic Plais is promising.
And finally, Commerce Guys also plans to build a Multi-Cloud PaaS Platform. This is a very rare capability in the field of platform clouds, and it will help enhance the agility and flexibility of the service. Platform.sh may well be known quite soon for manage parallel deployments on Amazon Web Service, as well as several other cloud infrastructures. French sovereign clouds are mentioned as well as Google…
Read also: With Platform.sh, Commerce Guys unveils cloud 2.0!
The claim is bold. But that’s what Platform seems to be. Based on the Amazon cloud, it’s a container based PaaS that is expected to transcend even the agility brought by virtualization itself.
