Cloud Platform Choice Proven by Time: Easy Setup and No Money Leak

Selecting a platform for hosting and managing your project is like choosing a partner for marriage - if you make the right choice, it will be long-term and happy relations. In 2012 İsmet Özalp, developer and co-founder of Hive, made his choice and never had any regrets during the last five years while running the ship management software Navatom at the Jelastic platform based on dogado infrastructure. Currently, Navatom has more than twenty modules, 3,000 users and is operating the ships all around the world.

And after some time of using Jelastic PaaS functionality, İsmet Özalp became not only the customer but also an advocate of our product within Turkish dev community. Several times İsmet was presenting the platform possibilities at the DevFest Istanbul, provided his feedback at IT Central Station and in interview with us. So today we’d like to share the latest updates and thoughts of İsmet on his experience in running Navatom in the cloud.

What stacks do you use to run the project and how they are interconnected?

Our traffic is automatically distributed with NGINX load balancer, and we use WildFly as an application server and MongoDB as a database. We created all these with the help of default container templates right from the environment topology in Jelastic dashboard. Currently there are more than 15 instances running inside Jelastic, including dev, test, and production (Jenkins, SONAR, Nexus) environments.

Why did you choose Java runtime?

Working in shipping industry has its own challenges: ships are connecting to internet through satellite internet providers, and although most of them are currently offering high speed internet to the shipping industry, there are still thousands of vessels which have only 128 kbps internet. So network traffic and client-side JavaScript optimization were the most important issues. And at the time when we first started developing Navatom, Google Web Toolkit was the best fit for us as a client-side technology, and, arguably still stays so. After we chose our client technology, which is based on Java, it was logical to use Java in the back-end. As it is much easier to work when you can use the same code in both front- and back-end.

What were the key reasons to host your project on Jelastic?

Well, there were three major reasons why we migrated to Jelastic:

Cost-efficient pricing model, when you pay only for what you use

Automatic vertical and horizontal scaling

Wide choice of stack templates in containers, that help us to set up our project environments in just a few minutes

What other hosting solutions did you previously use?

We were using AWS, and they did not have an easy setup process - we had to configure, setup and maintain everything ourselves. Jelastic helped us a lot and made these operations trivial.

Jelastic is based on containers, did you face any problems while moving from VMs to containers?

We are still in a hybrid state right now - some environments are containerized, and the others are still in VMs. But a plus is that we can easily move everything to containers without changing our code when it is required. Currently, most of the support services for our main application are already running from containers. And again during migration we haven't done any changes in our codebase.

What was the cost difference?

We were trying to adopt microservice architecture before migration to containers. But the cost of a single VM was too high, so we had to serve some services from the same VM. After migration to Jelastic container-based platform, running the same number of instances costed us much less than on AWS. Also, we don't need to pick instances for highest load any more and overpay, because of Jelastic automatic vertical scaling, so we are pleased with the end result.

Your general impression and highlights of using the platform

We have been working with dogado and Jelastic for quite a long time, and I am pleased to see how Jelastic transformed during this time. It`s great to see available most of the elements that I identified as missing at the very time we have joined Jelastic, this proves high responsiveness to customers` feedback.

Thank you, Ismet! We are always open to your feedback!

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If you're hunting for a solution to make your project more agile, automated in aspects of the environments setup and scaling, as well as more efficient in terms of TCO, then follow the example of Ismet and try Jelastic PaaS!

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