Aptana Cloud - Hands On
I received beta access today to Aptana cloud, something I’d previously mentioned. Aptana cloud is targeted at rapid development, in particular web applications that need to scale rapidly (think Facebook applications etc.)
Aptana cloud plugs nicely into the Aptana IDE as you would expect and as an extra treat it comes with a beta version of the new PHP editor and a pre-release version of Jaxer 1.0. This post will discuss some of the key features and my experience of trying out for the first time…
The only obvious change after the install if you can see a cloud control button next the Jaxer button at the top of the IDE.
After creating a project it then is automatically available in the cloud options.
When you click on the project under the cloud menu you are taken through a (very easy to use) wizard for configuration. This runs your through a few steps, setting up a site name, picking a payment plan (the beta is free), payment details and so on. Most of these screens are fairly standard, however the service selection is quite interesting. I imagine these prices are not final, so just take them with a pinch of salt.
The payment scheme seems to be quite flexible and we can see a large number of services that are included, PHP being the main server side language at the moment, with Aptana Jaxer still being a beta… (Ruby of Rails is on the ‘coming soon’ list). The prices range from the cheapest being 256 MB ram and 5 GB hard disc for $0.99 a day, up to 2 GB of ram and 25 GB hard disc for $8.22 a day. Seems fairly reasonably priced.
After set-up is finished, it phones home and does some magic. Shortly after displaying the following screen;
And sure enough, browse on over to http://mycloud.aptanacloud.com/ to see the following screen.
After that, you’re set up. You can go ahead and develop the application as normal. When you next go into the project in the cloud menu it provides you with a simple synchronisation process for uploading new and changed files. Going to http://mycloud.aptanacloud.com/index.php shows the output of a phpinfo. Currently running 5.2.5, thankfully nice and up to date! Doesn’t look like you are able to use pear however… that is shame.
This has been a very quick into, just to show exactly how easy it is to get started with a new project, there is a whole host of facilities that have been integrated that I’ve not covered. See the following screenshot for a quick look-see. Database management, SVN, back-ups and more all now easily managed from one IDE.
The first questions that then spring to mind are, I don’t see how to develop with two versions for testing etc. As we don’t want to be testing under a live environment do we! I’m assuming there is also a way for developing with SVN and having multiple developers working on the same projects.
All in all, I’m quite impressed and look forward to seeing this develop further.
I’ve liked the idea of Jaxer since I first heard about it, now with Aptana cloud I’ve got some online hosting where I can try out a few things. Expect some Jaxer posts coming soon! 
p.s. I didn’t notice any of the new PHP features…
Tags: Aptana, Cloud computing, hands on, jaxer, PHP
June 2nd, 2008 at 8:54 pm
Hey Dougal,
Thanks for your positive feedback and review of the cloud, but I did notice one thing I wanted to comment on…
Regarding the lack of Pear support, we’ve decided not to bundle it in for several reasons, such as this being a multi-user environment and not wanting to have everybody sharing one local Pear repository. We figured the best solution would be to use go-pear.php to create your own local instance of pear. This basically will set up pear in your doc root for you and provides a nice web interface for downloading / updating / installing pear packages. Check it out:
http://pear.php.net/go-pear
Like I said, we think this should be a good solution, but I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts as well.
June 2nd, 2008 at 9:48 pm
Thanks, I’m not that familiar with Pear. I only recently started using it in more depth. I’ll check that out. Cheers!
June 10th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
[...] Aptana Cloud - Hands On (dougalmatthews.com) [...]
June 10th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
[...] Matthews has been playing with Aptana Cloud in a beta form. He wrote up this piece that walks you through the functionality with screenshots: [...]
June 11th, 2008 at 11:37 am
Hi Dougal,
Very interesting stuff, thanks for the first look. One comment:
“…up to 2 GB of ram and 25 GB hard disc for $8.22 a day. Seems fairly reasonably priced…”
As you say, pricing is probably still in flux, but I’d want that number to come down markedly. $8.22/day is about $250/month, for 2GB of RAM and 25GB of disk, “up to” 95% of 8 CPUs only at peaks, business-hours only support for critical issues, and one admin an one developer. In the dedicated server market, that would be substantially overpriced. Obviously the cloud has advantages beyond a dedicated server (big ones) which makes up some of that gap, but…
I’d *really* like to see how that number changes with 24/7/365 support and a larger dev/admin team. I’m not running a commercial site on any infrastructure where I can’t get someone on the phone if there’s a critical outage, regardless of what time it is where they are. And it isn’t clear to me why the size of my dev or admin teams is any of their business.
Still, very exciting stuff. Would hate to see it fall down on pricing.
Thanks again for the sneak peek,
–
T.J. Crowder
tj / crowder software / com
June 12th, 2008 at 7:47 am
[...] из западных блоггеров (Dougal Matthews) его все же достал и написал обзор первых впечатлений. На его основе сегодня и мы опишем, чего же ожидать от [...]
June 17th, 2008 at 8:18 pm
T.J,
24 hour support adds $0.99 per day, and a unlimited developers adds $0.33 per day.
I don’t think it sounds too expensive, its only compared to some shared hosting solutions. However shared hosting doesn’t cut it for many projects.
I do wonder how it all works in the back-end. Is this effectively shared hosting with a nice front on it? Or is it based on VM’s?
June 18th, 2008 at 8:19 am
Hi Dougal,
Thanks for the added info. It’ll be interesting to see where they end up with it.
Yeah, I wonder about the backend as well. As you suggest, it sounds a bit like shared hosting, but it also sounds a bit like VMs…
– T.J.
July 1st, 2008 at 8:43 am
I searched for \’Quick Host Php Web Hosting\’ in google and found this your post (\’Aptana Cloud - Hands On\’) in search results. Not very relevant result, but still interesting to read.
July 1st, 2008 at 9:01 am
I actually disagree. Aptana Cloud is very quick in terms of setting up etc. and its actual speed depends on how much you are willing to spend… It also hosts PHP too. So really it covers everything you searched for.