anynines Is Going Live – Best Time to Give It a Go!

This is an article about anynines – from the very beginning to the final going out of beta.
_If you want to learn about anynines history, keep on reading – if you’re eager to know what will happen in the future, hop to the last paragraph of this post!

Table of Contents

• Why we founded anynines
  • What we did during the beta phase
  • Why did we choose Cloud Foundry?
  • Service development
  • Establishing the anynines community
  • Out of Beta our biggest challenges
  • What the “out of beta” means to you
• That brings the future

Why we founded anynines

anynines was founded in April 2013 at the Avarteq Headquarters in Saarbrücken, Germany.
From the beginning hosting was an essential part of Avarteq and we gained first-hand experience in this field with Enterprise-Rails, a hosting brand featured by Avarteq.

 With that knowledge, it became clear to us that we want to take hosting to a next, revolutionary level – establishing an European Platform as a Service (PaaS) based on the Open Source software Cloud Foundry.

We gathered in a first brainstorming session to find a name for our new product. We always push hard for 99,999…% availability and application security in hosting, so we decided on the name anynines shortly before our brains set on fire. We never thought we’d spend so much time on a brand name alone!

anynines was born and we set out into the future of Cloud-Hosting. We started, naturally, with a beta.

What we did during the beta phase

Firstly, we set up our team. In the first days our team had a size of three to five people but over the months more and more new members joined the team. The team members these days were Julian Fischer, the founder of anynines and one of the CEOs of Avarteq, Oliver & Julian for the development part, Nico for admin tasks and me for the marketing.

For final copywriting and design we worked together with Mirek Woźniak and Mariusz Cieśla who both did a fantastic job and we could welcome Floor Drees who was responsible for the growing community. 

Why did we choose Cloud Foundry?

We compared different emerging PaaS projects to have an overview over the market and believed in the concepts of Cloud Foundry. We believe in the power of Open Source standards which also enforced our decision towards Cloud Foundry as a basis for anynines.

Our estimation proved to be correct and Cloud Foundry has developed to the market leader in Open Source Platform as a Service frameworks with a rapidly growing community and the well funded Cloud Foundry Foundation behind the project. To manage our infrastructure automation we used BOSH from the beginning. In our vision anynines should support both – private and public usage scenarios.

Challenges

Hence Cloud Foundry was our first choice for establishing anynines. There were some obstacles to overcome.

We had to stabilize the runtime and weigh out Cloud Foundry components equally. We also had to implement an invoicing integration, a customer panel and fill other feature gaps.

Service development

Because the existing community services unfortunately were outdated and not high available as we needed them to be. For our vision of anynines we have to create highly available updated service solutions on our own. These will be available soon.

Establishing the anynines community

We had the PaaS and the IaaS but as we all know – an awesome idea is nothing without people learning about it and joining the movement. So we had to establish social media channels, a support board, marketing strategies and and and…

A big issue for us was to get in touch with the people we want to provide anynines to as an alternative European service to PaaS providers from the US. So we started sponsoring meetups, workshops and conferences and visiting them.
So our anynines community began to grow and today a solid group of anynines enthusiasts is helping us by giving important feedback, writing tutorials and HowTos and even mentioning us in blog articles.

Out of Beta our biggest challenges

So here we are now – going out of beta and providing a functional European Platform as a Service solution for application developers. In addition we work hard with our partners to support them in creating their own private PaaS solutions based on the anynines software stack.
But before this day we had some big challenges to cope with. For example we switched from a rented VMWare infrastructure layer to a self hosted OpenStack IaaS layer.

What the “out of beta” means to you

If you’re already an anynines user you’ll automatically enter a 30 day trial period for your application instances with the same quota as during the beta phase. The only thing you have to do – if you didn’t already – is to deposit your payment data. This is important because after these 30 days the resources you use with your account will be charged for. In case you want to view a list of used resources in detail – just have a look at the customer panel.

That brings the future

We are focused on bringing new features regularly to you. To give you a short view about what we’re working on we’ll go deeper into the anynines service development plan. Our goal is to exchange each community service one after another. We’re also working on service instance connections via client tools from outside of the cloud.

Right now we are testing our MongoDB service implementation internally which includes high available Replica Sets, the latest MongoDB version and dedicated service instances.
In addition we are preparing internal PostgreSQL test runs for our new service implementation which provides a high available cluster solution, the latest PostgreSQL version and dedicated service instances.

We also work on developing a Redis service. Not to forget the Diego (next generation application executor) integration we want to provide to you as soon as possible.

As you can see there is a lot going on so you can be curious what we’ll bring to you in the future. If you have not worked with anynines yet – just try it out.