Difficulty: Beginner
Additional Reading: Managing your Environments in Reclaim Cloud
Video transcript:
I want to give you a brief introduction to the interface and specifically focus on creating new environments using the topology wizard, deploying pre-built environments from the Marketplace, and importing scripts that you or others have built into your account. Let’s get started.
In the top left you’ll find menu items that correspond to each of these actions. Let’s look at the topology wizard first by clicking New Environment
Reclaim Cloud supports a variety of different scripting languages seen here: Java, PHP, Ruby, Node.js, Python, Go, and Docker containers. For each scripting language you have the ability to create a stack of resources (also known as Nodes) for that particular application.
Let’s take PHP for example. Apache is set by default but that could easily be switched to Nginx or another preferred web server. I can add a load balancer to my stack easily and again it may use Nginx as a default load balancer but if I prefer to use Haproxy, Varnish, or other load balancers I can switch those here.
Caching is supported with Memcache. Database options include a variety of different engines and versions of those engines including NoSQL databases like Mongo or Couchbase. And I can also setup networked attached storage that can be mounted to my application, which is particularly useful when setting up high availability for your application. At the top I can also provision an SSL certificate for the environment.
Reclaim Cloud supports vertical scaling of any node in your environment. We use a unit of measurement called a Cloudlet. 1 cloudlet is equal to 128 megabytes of memory and 400 megahertz of CPU. I have the ability here to reserve a particular number of cloudlets but also to allow this node to scale up dynamically to use more cloudlets as need be, and pricing (which is calculated hourly) will be estimated for that range on the righthand side. This means your application can scale up or down as resources are used and you will only be billed for actual resource usage rather than needing to estimate and buy a certain amount of server power that you pay for 24/7 like with other VPS providers.
Reclaim Cloud also supports horizontal scaling of nodes in your environment. This allows you to run not just one application server, but multiple and you can set rules by which new nodes are created and destroyed as resource limits are reached.
We can set the disk limit for a node here. Choose what amount of delay we want for any necessary restarts when deploying an application (to provide zero downtime deployments), and set dedicated IP addresses, both IPv4 and IPv6.
For Docker applications we are able to search container images directly from Docker Hub to deploy. At the bottom we can set environment variables, mounted volumes, links between containers, as well as the port and entry point for the container allowing a lot of flexibility.
On the right we’ll give the environment a name and click create to start the provisioning process.
Now let’s look at the Marketplace, an area where pre-built environments are available for quick installation. The marketplace has categories for a variety of application types including content management systems, clustered high-availability setups, and developer tools. You can search an application in the top right, for example WordPress, click to install, choose your environment name, and start the install process.
Reclaim Cloud also supports creating and importing your own scripts using the Jelastic Cloud Scripting language. This takes the form of YAML or JSON files that can be uploaded, imported by URL, or pasted directly into the import section here. Once imported you can start the install process by filling out the details requested. If you’re interested in writing your own scripts you can read more about this at https://docs.cloudscripting.com
