Today, Platform.sh, the Continuous Deployment Platform-as-a-Service cloud hosting company, announces their plans to enable companies to run highly available and scalable web applications based on Drupal, Symfony or PHP in German datacenters. Platform.sh manages the entire application lifecycle from development to production instances with 99.99% uptime guarantees for production environments.
Platform.sh will be available on Azure from the second half of 2016 using Microsoft Cloud Germany: Customer data is stored in German datacenters only. Data is exchanged between two data centers through a private network to ensure data resides in Germany. Access to the customer data stored in these new datacenters will be under the control of T-Systems, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, an independent German company acting as a data trustee.
Customers outside Germany are also able to deploy Platform.sh to all 24 Azure regions around the world. A first wave of customers is already being invited to participate in the beta phase. Companies interested in joining the program can find out more at find out more here.
Among the notable Platform.sh features which attracted Microsoft is the rapid cloning technology which eliminates DevOps overhead and enables byte-for-byte copies of entire live sites, keeping the code, files, services and data in lockstep. This NoOps approach maintains perfect consistency between branched environments, which in itself is valuable for live site support, but even more so for development teams, who now have on-demand access to perfectly consistent copies of master environments. This means every new feature can be developed and successfully tested in its own exact copy of the live system, giving CTOs and CMOs confidence that it will behave exactly as expected when it goes through staging, or even straight to live.
Customers will benefit from improved development and deployment processes, up to 20% better developer productivity, a 40% faster UAT cycle and up to 90% reduction in systems administration activity and ticketing. New levels of Continuous Delivery are achievable through integration with the Platfrom.sh API from existing development tools and processes to request instant copies of environments for various purposes.
The Platform.sh PaaS has been designed with continuous delivery and 99.99% high availability in mind. Scaling compute and storage resource up or down is both quick and seamless, whilst making critical changes to stack and core application components goes unnoticed by the shopping customer. In fact, over the 4 day Black Friday weekend last November, we were able to announce that not a single Enterprise customer experienced any application downtime whatsoever, despite all the usual problems.
About Platform.sh Platform.sh is a ground-breaking hosting and development tool for PHP and NodeJS web applications. It extends a branch-merge workflow to infrastructure so that every branch can be tested as if it were in production, and live sites scale effortlessly to serve the most demanding traffic. Enterprise plans boast a unique, triple-redundant offering, and 24/7 follow-the-sun support. Based on Open Source technologies, Platform.sh is ideal for agile software development, continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD). Based in Paris, France, the company has technical, support, and sales staff throughout Europe, the United States, and the Asia-Pacific region providing cloud services to thousands of companies in various areas including fashion, publishing, retail, travel, engineering and the public sector.