Free Platform as a Service Providers
Free PaaS options for deving, experimenting and more
It seems that almost all the major Platform as a Service providers offer some kind of free plan. I thought to share a few of them for others to see and benefit. They are especially useful if you are trying to learn a new technology and try out different service providers.
Careful, don't get locked in
The providers have realized that most customers don't want to change
providers once they have passed the learning curve on one provider. As a
customer you should however be ready to move your deployment as quickly
as possible. You can do this by avoiding the proprietary technologies
provided by the service providers or at least abstract their usage in a
way that makes it easy to rewrite those parts if you change providers.
AppEngine is good example of a provider that offers a wide range of
proprietary technologies that will make moving your deployment away from
there difficult if you haven't thought about it when developing it.
If you have time to learn a bit go ahead and try do deploy your app to a few of the platforms listed below, if it goes well you might get the confidence to change to a better suited provider if the time comes in the future. Some of the providers require more effort, but if you want to try an easy one take a look at Heroku, it supports easy deployment through Git.
Google App Engine
Offers: Python, Go and Java (and any other JVM language) platform, and many useful services.
Note: Appengine offers you to many Google specific technologies like Datastore, Channel API, Tasks and Cron. This makes is more difficult to migrate out of AppEngine. Also if you use 3rd party libraries or frameworks, they may not work because of the proprietary datastore.
Free plan: 1GB database, 1GB outgoing bandwidth/day and 50k DB ops/day. Check more detailed breakdown on their pricing page. These limits are enough for most private websites or blogs, Based on peoples experiences you can get 300k+ page views per month within the limits for average app (discussion here).
Heroku
Offers: Ruby, Node.js, Clojure, Java, Python, and Scala platform. In addition they offer support for many other languages through buildpacks.
Note: Heroku is a quality provider from what I have heard. They support easy deployment through git.
Free plan: 750 processing hours (enough for 100% uptime), 5MB database. So usually the database size is the limiting factor.
Engine Yard Cloud
Offers: Ruby on rails stack.
Free tryout: 500 instance hours free (must be used within 6 months), more here.
Windows Azure
Offers: .net, node.js, Java, PHP or other (language of your choice).
Note: You'll be on Microsoft stack, so don't dream of MySQL here.
Free trial: 3 month trial includes 750 hours on small instance (enough for 100% uptime), 1GB database, 20GB storage, 20GB outbound bandwidth
Cloud Foundry
Cloud foundry is an interesting one. They use their Open Source PaaS platform. You can download and install this image to your own machine if you want. This also means you can privately run their PaaS platform on any infrastructure you choose, EC2 for example.
Offers: Ruby, Node.js, Java or any other technology. MySQL, Postgres, Mongo or Redis database. Read more about their infrastructure.
Free during beta. Beta will end during 2012, but pricing after that is not announced.
Redhat Openshift
Offers: Java, Ruby, Node.js, Python, PHP and Perl. MySQL, PostgreSQL and MongoDB databases. More about their features here.
Note: The service looks very developer friendly, and already on the landing page you can see them advertising "No Lock in". They also have community section in their site following the open source traditions.
Free plan: 3x 500MB ram and 1GB HD. Their whole operations seems to be around free plan.
dotCloud
Offers: Any technology (well, maybe not every, but their supported technology list is impressively long).
Note: They show their roadmap, which is nice touch of openness. Many technologies seem to be in "upcoming" or "alpha" stage.
Free plan: Two services of your choice, for example Python and MongoDB. Databases have 10MB hd and 10MB ram in free plan.
AppHarbor
Offers: .NET platfor as a service. Many additional services available as Add-Ons.
Free plan: Free plan includes 1 web worker unit. In addition they have wide variety of Add-Ons that have free option including: Mysql, CouchDb, MongoDb and RabbitMQ (task queue).
Amazon EC2
EC2 is actually an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), but I included it here, because if you have some administrative skills you can quite quickly set up any platform you like.
Offers: Virtual machine (Linux or Windows) and related services.
Note: You'll have to manage the virtual machine yourself, so you'll most probably need to get familiar with linux commandline. Managing any security or other problems on the OS level yourself isn't for everybody and requires some skills and effort.
Free plan: 1 year only. 750 hours per month Micro Instance (enough for 100% uptime), 100MB storage, 30GB Elastic Block Storage and 5GB S3 storage. Detailed limitations here. Biggest limitation for many is low CPU performance of the Micro instance. Here are some benchmark results that show it's CPU is comparable to the Nokia N900 smartphone.
Cloud Database providers
You can also get Database as a service. Using database through public internet does bring some performance and security issues, but they are easy for testing out new databases.
- MongoDB: MongoLab offers 240MB free database.
- MySQL: Xeround offers 10MB database for free.
- Apache CouchDB: Cloudant offers 250MB database for free.
https://grandcentral.cloudbees.com/#doClickStart
https://grandcentral.cloudbees.com/#doClickStart
Google App Engine (GAE)
AppScale
OpenShift
Cloud Foundry
Ironfoundry
Stackato (activestate)
Engine Yard Cloud
MS AZURE
Force.com
NetSuite
Facebook Developers
Heroku
WorkXpress
OrangeScape
Gigaspaces
Jplaton
AppFog
Apprenda
Cloudify
Cumulogic
Joyent
dotCloud
Amazon Elastic Beanstalk
Oracle PaaS
WSO2 Stratos
CloudForge
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Not a platform in the traditional sense, Amazon's AWS Elastic Beanstalk changes how developers push their apps into Amazon's cloud. Developers upload the app and Elastic Beanstalk handles the deployment details, capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling and app health monitoring. |
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Appistry's CloudIQ platform helps developers deliver scalable, reliable and easy-to-manage apps on private, public and hybrid clouds. Appistry hangs its hat on reducing app delivery time by 60 percent, increasing management efficiency by 20 times and cutting costs by 80 percent. |
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AppScale offers an open-source cloud computing platform for Google App Engine applications. The platform gives developers the power to deploy and monitor their App Engine apps in an open-source environment while providing mechanisms to debug and profile applications as needed. |
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The fruit of CA's acquisition of 3Tera, CA AppLogic is a turnkey application-centric cloud platform targeted at MSPs that lets users turn an application and the infrastructure supporting it into a single manageable object called a virtual business service. |
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Engine Yard has raised $37.5 million in funding, which has helped it build Engine Yard AppCloud, a Rails Application Cloud for cloud developers. Engine Yard's platform offers simple, automated Rails deployment and management that makes for easy app migration. |
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Flexiant's public cloud platform, FlexiScale, has made the company one of Europe's premier cloud players and an up-and-comer in the U.S. The platform is aimed at SMEs and startups looking to offer streaming video, social networking, IPTV, VoIP or SaaS. |
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Force.com, Salesforce. com's Platform-as-a-Service arm, has set the standard for developing multitenant cloud applications. Through Force.com, Salesforce opened up its infrastructure so everyone can use it for custom app development and build business apps that run on Salesforce's servers. |
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The gCloud3 gPlatform gives SMBs private cloud and a swift ROI by enabling them to deploy virtual desktops and servers at a fraction of the cost of their physical counterparts. gCloud3 promises "zero to production with high availability" in hours. |
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GigaSpaces grew from its application server and scalability roots to a PaaS player with its cloud-enablement platform, which enables end-to-end scaling for distributed, mission-critical app environments. PaaS enablement, coupled with SaaS enablement, gives GigaSpaces an edge enabling clouds. |
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Gizmox's Visual WebGui has become a go-to platform for developers looking to build cloud and mobile applications. Visual WebGui is .Net open-source Ajax-powered and lets developers build, migrate, run and manage apps for the cloud or for mobile devices. |
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Google has made a name for itself with its Google Apps suite of business and consumer cloud applications and its Google App Engine, the developer platform that lets users build and host Web apps in the cloud in an effortless fashion. |
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GridGain's open-source cloud application platform helps developers build scalable applications that can work natively on managed infrastructure, from a Google Android device to large grids and clouds. The software supports major OSes and provides native support for Java and Scala. |
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LongJump makes software that powers PaaS and gives enterprises and ISVs the ability to design, develop, deploy and distribute SaaS and Web-based apps. A catalog of ready-to-use, customizable business apps helps companies quickly and efficiently develop and deliver data-driven apps. |
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Microsoft's cloud platform, Windows Azure, is a little more than a year old and is still gathering momentum. Azure has blossomed into more than just a development play—it's a full-fledged cloud services operating system that also offers service hosting and service management. |
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OpenStack, an open-source cloud platform launched by Rackspace and NASA, has revolutionized the cloud computing game. Users and providers can leverage the platform to launch their own cloud services using code culled from a community of contributors. |
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Want fast and easy app development? Look to OrangeScape. Its PaaS play enables developers to build out solutions quickly and easily using a model-driven visual development environment for business applications that can be deployed as SaaS or on-premise. |
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OS33 doesn't restrict itself to the cloud. Instead, it offers an all-out cloud IT delivery automation platform. The company targets MSPs and gives them a single interface to provision servers, publish applications and select from a catalog of preintegrated software. |
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OutSystems’ Agile Platform seeks to cut the time for developers to create and change custom enterprise Web apps. The company claims Web apps can be developed nearly 11 times faster and be changed in days with one-click deploy and roll-back. |
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With its automated Cloud Management Platform, RightScale looks to deliver scalable, affordable and powerful on-demand capabilities of the cloud that also gives IT shops control and transparency in their cloud environments. The platform comes in a host of flavors. |
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ThinkGrid tackles pretty much every facet of the cloud, but it's its service oriented cloud platform that takes the cake. The platform gives partners and customers the keys to design, build and launch business services that solve specific problems while executing tasks like billing and managing in the same interface. |
Heroku
http://www.heroku.com/Agile deployment for Ruby, Node.js, Clojure, Java, Python, and Scala.Get up and running in minutes, and deploy instantly with git. Focus 100% on your code, and never think about servers, instances, or VMs again.
- The most mature PaaS. It's been around for a very long time, starting as a PaaS for Rails & then expanding to many other frameworks.
- Very reasonable pricing.
- Supports Node.js 0.8.x
- When your deploy fails you see a legitimate error log. Many of the other PaaS give you nondescript messages and debugging is a pain. Debugging Heroku wins by comparison.
- Doesnt' support Websockets. You have to configure Socket.io for XHR Polling, which works fine.
- I'm keeping my finger on it's pulse; Heroku has been my historical bread-and-butter (Rails), and will be my recommendation once they support Websockets.
- Incidentally, for PaaS Websocket support see Node.js Websocket Hosting Roundup
Nodejitsu
http://nodejitsu.com/The simplest, most reliable and intelligent Node.js hosting platform you can get.
- The most successful Node PaaS, in my experience.
- The team running the show are some of the best-known Node.js developers.
- Incredible support. Not much luck emailing them, but hop into #nodejitsu IRC and they answer your questions in shocking time and thoroughness.
- Very inexpensive. Currently free, which will change very soon to $3 / drone / mo. (a drone runs a single app). That probably makes this the cheapest of the PaaS.
- You get a lot of nondescript "socket hang up" errors, debugging Nodejitsu can be pretty tough.
- While Websockets work for most things on Nodejitsu, still couldn't get it working for DerbyJS. However, configuring Socket.io to use XHR Polling was successful, and the app works just fine. I need to connect with them on debugging DerbyJS's Websocket support.
Nodester
http://nodester.com/Deploy your Node.JS applications to Nodester.com for FREE or deploy your apps to your own private cloud instance of Nodester running in your own datacenter or on Amazon EC2, Rackspace, or GoGrid! Deploy your Node.JS applications to Nodester.com for FREE or deploy your apps to your own private cloud instance of Nodester running in your own datacenter or on Amazon EC2, Rackspace, or GoGrid!
Nodester is an open source Node.JS Platform-as-a-Service written in Node.JS with a RESTful API designed to run in any cloud without a VPS! It is the first of its kind and 100% open sourced under the GNU Affero license on GitHub.
- Pretty flippin' epic - the whole platform is opensource and free. You choose to run your dev app for free, or run it through Nodester on your own Rackspace / EC2 instance to scale. Really cool concept, and I hope they succeed.
- I spent a lot of time on this platform, trying to get my Derby app to deploy. Unfortunately, it (1) had more errors than the others, and (2) the errors were non-descript and difficult to debug. However, it's been a long time since I tried, so things might have changed.
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