anynines Platform-as-a-Service – The Return of Billing

anynines on AWS started about a year ago, and people asked us multiple times, when we are going to add billing to the platform. While on one side, people like free stuff, running on something which is “free as free beer” often raises questions like “Why is it free?” or “Are they uncertain that it will work?”.

Table of Contents

• The first year on AWS Ireland
  • AWS and Data Privacy
  • What we plan for the Future
  • What does it cost?
  • When will those changes take effect?
• I have further questions / where can I create an account

The first year on AWS Ireland

After moving to AWS, we first wanted to ensure the stability and reliability of the infrastructure before starting to charge you, as we previously had issues regarding infrastructure reliability on OpenStack. After a year with 99.99% uptime, we can confidently say, that the infrastructure and PaaS are stable and to really reach our goal of having an uptime of nearly 100%, any nines.

AWS and Data Privacy

Some customers, especially german customers, asked us about the Data Privacy on AWS. For information about the role of Amazon in your business relationship with us, please consult this Amazon AWS whitepaper about Data Privacy for German Customers.

In short, Amazon will at no point  access the data without a valid subpoena or search warrant. This means, that they will not access the data for marketing or advertising reasons either.

We, anynines, will also not interact manually with any of your data. All data is either processed automatically by lifecycle tools, like the BOSH Director and the Backup framework or by your app’s code. At no time will we transfer your data out of the Amazon eu-west-1 region unless specifically instructed otherwise by you.

App Data

Your application code and droplets are located in a blob store during the lifecycle of the app. Due to technical limits, those packages can persist after deletion of the apps for a certain time, but cannot be referenced back to your app by a non-administrative user.
Your application’s Environment Variables and Service binding informations are stored encrypted in the Cloud Controller database and will be  deleted immediately when you delete your application.

Service Instances data retention

Service instances will retain your data:

• • During the lifetime of your service instance
  • Backups are created daily for PostgreSQL and MongoDB and retained for 14 days and then automatically deleted.
  • After deletion of the service instance, the disks of that instance will be retained for fiveays as failsafe mechanism of the orchestrator, then be automatically deleted.

Should you need to delete the data immediately, please open a support ticket, so we can assist you.

What we plan for the Future

Now that we reactivate the billing, it is only fair to tell you what we plan for the future.

• • • MongoDB 3.2
      We are currently offering 2.6 and people asked us, when we are going to offer more recent versions, so I am  glad to announce, that we will soon offer MongoDB 3.2. But, due to the database not being able to easily migrate, we will start offering both versions while assisting you migrating your data. When all services are migrated, we will be discontinuing MongoDB 2.6.
    • Streamlining the disk space for Service Databases.
Currently our services have a range of available disk space of 6-10 GB for small services, and 15-25GB for medium services. We will streamline the disk space to 10GB for small services and 50GB for medium ones. We will also do this retroactively to already existing services, which will cause a few minutes of downtime during disk scaling, but will in the end allow you to get more out of your services.
    • New shared domain.
      Tired of using yourappname.aws.ie.a9sapp.eu? now we also support yourappname.app.anynines.cloud.

What does it cost?

Here you find an overview. Find the detailed pricing here.

When will those changes take effect?

All organisations will start a 30 day trial period beginning today July 1th 2017. As soon as you add your credit card information, your trial period will end, your organisation will be billed but all trial limitations, like the limit on app instances will be removed.You will also be able to create clustered database instances.

What if I do not want to stay?

First, we would be sad to see you go. Please consider leaving us a note at support@anynines.com why you did not think that we are the right partner for you. Otherwise, you do not have to do anything. Your organizations trial will end at the end of July, your app instances will be stopped and your services  will be deleted a month afterwards. You can still reactivate your account if you decide otherwise.

I have further questions / where can I create an account

To create an account, just visit paas.anynines.com and select sign-up.

If you have further questions, write a mail to support@anynines.com.