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Contabo launches PaaS platform in early-access
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Contabo launches PaaS platform in early-access

Contabo wants to strengthen its presence as a cloud player. While browsing their site, they mention a PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) product: ZeroOps.
This appears to be a partnership with https://zerops.io/.

An Early-Access has been launched, and anyone can sign up for the waiting list.
https://contabo.com/en/zerops/

Thanked by 1ales

Comments

  • LeviLevi Member

    Absolutely not clear what is zerops. Very bad UX, way worse than aws. In which segment contabo wants to compete? Cloud for poor? If yes,than they have a chance. If vs hetzner - they are toasted.

    Thanked by 1MikeA
  • It seems an alternative to Jelastics and I am gonna try it as it is easy to scale with very minimal work.

    Thanked by 1ales
  • From what I read, Contabo is like a Volkswagen inside, with Mercedes Benz logo and appearance. Personally, I want a Benz inside with a Volkswagen logo.

  • sotssots Member

    @letlover said:
    From what I read, Contabo is like a Volkswagen inside, with Mercedes Benz logo and appearance. Personally, I want a Benz inside with a Volkswagen logo.

    Do you have any examples?

  • letloverletlover Member
    edited July 2022

    @sots said:

    @letlover said:
    From what I read, Contabo is like a Volkswagen inside, with Mercedes Benz logo and appearance. Personally, I want a Benz inside with a Volkswagen logo.

    Do you have any examples?

    Don't mind what I say. I just tell the impression of other users' reviews. I personally don't have hands on experience of Contabo yet.

  • AXYZEAXYZE Member
    edited July 2022

    Holy shit.
    It's the worst UX design I have seen in years!

    We will focus just on one element. One. And that's most important element, one that make you ANY sales or customers.

    Pricing page.

    But that's not pricing page that's a popup! Questionable choice, but okay.
    523px wide popup with big ass padding on desktop. Damn.
    Their tables doesn't fit. Jesus.
    Geniuses decided to make them scroll horizontally. AAAAAAAAAAA

    That's already pretty nice waste of space, but they managed to waste even more pixels.
    That pretty, visible horizontal scroll... doesn't work at all. I'm just laughing at this point.

    Meh, lets close this popup...
    But how? What would you do?
    Click outside of popup?

    Of course you would do it, but here (also of course) it doesn't work.

    You have to click "close button" on bottom.
    Just like you need to click "close tab" in your browser when you see shit like this in production from a company that want to put your business in their hands.

    This is just one element. Most important one to do any sales. And clearly nobody even tested it.

    You guys be like... ohhh thats just an early access, they will fix it!
    https://www.world-today-news.com/the-czech-vshosting-changes-owners-again-the-company-was-completely-dominated-by-the-germans/
    "Zerops (...) The public beta should start in November this year,"
    November.
    2020.

    Wow. Just wow.

    Thanked by 1ralf
  • leapswitchleapswitch Patron Provider, Veteran

    @imgmoney said:
    It seems an alternative to Jelastics and I am gonna try it as it is easy to scale with very minimal work.

    Would love to hear your comparison of Jelastic (Virtuozzo Application Platform) vs Zerops.

    Thanked by 1ales
  • alesales Member
    edited August 2022

    Hey everyone, Aleš from Zerops here. Glad I found this thread, otherwise the precious feedback would be lost! Hope I can clarify few things.

    Let’s being with the relationship between Contabo and Zerops — Zerops is a cloud platform being developed by and based on know-how of vshosting (a company focused on providing premium managed cloud services for big internet projects through their own Tier 3 datacenter). Since vshosting is part of Contabo Group (along with GPORTAL and Contabo itself), it was decided to give Contabo customers (specifically to the “Contabo customer counsel” - a group of Contabo customer interested in testing new products) a free early access to gather some feedback.

    After the initial feedback we are launching a proper open beta (still completely free) on Monday, with the same goal of gathering feedback from developers of modern, high availability ready software — our main target group.

    @LTniger

    Absolutely not clear what is zerops.

    Zerops is a cloud platform created specifically for developers. You can check the new website for beta at https://zerops.io, along with the introductionary blog post which goes into a bit more detail or what why and for whom at https://zerops.io/article/introducing-zerops-a-cloud-platform-with-developers-at-heart.

    Very bad UX, way worse than aws.

    If you are talking about the old website that was at zerops.io (with the single headline and nothing else), it was basically an equivalent of

    if you are talking about something in the application itself, I'm all ears.

    In which segment contabo wants to compete? Cloud for poor? If yes,than they have a chance. If vs hetzner - they are toasted.

    I can't talk for our collegues at Contabo, but Zerops falls into the same segment as for example render.com, digital ocean app platform, fly.io, railway.app, hostman.com and also vercel and netlify (as soon as we get the static service with a built-in CDN for frontend apps ready).

    @AXYZE
    Whoah, quite a scathing review, but I'm glad you gave Zerops a try nevertheless!

    It's the worst UX design I have seen in years!
    We will focus just on one element. One. And that's most important element, one that make you ANY sales or customers.
    Pricing page.

    Zerops is in beta and is completely free, there are no intentions to make sales right now. The goal of the early access for Contabo customers was to gather feedback on the core functionality (which is at this point mostly stable and feature complete). The pricing is definitely not set in stone yet either, as soon as it will be and Zerops will be out of the beta you will definitely find the pricing on our homepage.

    I'm interested what other parts of Zerops you'd categorize as the worst UX design you have seen in years though.

    523px wide popup with big ass padding on desktop. Damn.
    Their tables doesn't fit. Jesus.
    Geniuses decided to make them scroll horizontally. AAAAAAAAAAA

    Sure, fair point, I have increased the size of the popup. Which by the way serves just as a quick view into the documentation, which itself is using VuePress, so it's not quite like we, the geniuses, decided to make the tables scroll on lower resolutions. :smile:

    Just like you need to click "close tab" in your browser when you see shit like this in production from a company that want to put your business in their hands.

    Zerops is definitely not in production, not sure how you got that impression. Zerops is in beta, for free and it was clearly stated in the mail going to Contabo customers, as well as on their landing page.

    You guys be like... ohhh thats just an early access, they will fix it!

    I'm sure we will 🙂 come join us on Discord, me, or anyone from the dev team usually responds immediately and can get small bugs fixed by the next day, the rest gets prioritized and handled as best as we can.


    I hope you all can give the new website for beta at https://zerops.io a look and read the intro blog post at https://zerops.io/article/introducing-zerops-a-cloud-platform-with-developers-at-heart but if you don’t, let me try and give you a quick idea of what Zerops is about by explaining the three things that differentiate it from the platforms I mentioned before.

    Fully automatic scaling, both horizontally and vertically.

    Zerops is able to fully automatically scale each service both by increasing and decreasing the amount of containers as well as increasing and decreasing resources on each container. The steps that Zerops is able to scale with are as as small as 0.25 GB RAM, 1 vCPU (with 1:10 virtualization) and 0.5 GB of Disc space. Each resource can be scaled independently from each other. The technical limits are between 1 and 64 containers and 1 to 300 vCPU and 0.25 to 300 GB of RAM on each container (limits for the beta are much smallers, since Zerops is being ran only on 20 physical server nodes). The autoscaling is not mindless either, especially managed database servies have autoscaling crafted and optimized for each technology with fully managed proxy balancers in case of HA mode.

    Robust project infrastructure

    This is partially what makes autoscaling possible, with each project you deploy you get a set of core services that take care of orchestration, securing the connection from the internet to the private network of the project (L3 with firewall included), load balancing and SSL termination (L7), as well as gathering logs and statistics for each user service. This setup is not unlike what a Kubernetes cluster would provide you and is based on the most robust setups vshosting offers to their customers.

    Pricing model to tie both these features together

    As a developer you definitely want as many environments of your project as possible — devel, stage, production or even one for local development for each of you team members. You also want for these environments to ideally be identical, no developer likes to encounter the “but it works on my machine 😓” situations. So with the pricing model we tried to make this as achievable and affordable as possible, there are no “plans” no “packages”, no extra payments for team members etc. Each project gets the same robust core infrastructure, each service is able to automatically scale. So you can literally have the identical setup for local development that you do for the production, both can start at the minimum (1 vCPU, 0.25 GB RAM), but your development will stay there, while you production might scale up and down as required by the current load.

    So the pricing model is $5 flat fee for 30 days of project and then $1 / 1 vCPU, $1.12 / 0.25 GB RAM for the current resources of user services inside the project. The resources pricing is minute based, so if your services go from 1 vCPU on 1 container to 30 vCPU x 4 containers for 20 minutes, you only pay for the 20 minutes.

    On top of these we have REST API, ability to setup infrastructure-as-code, very flexible build and deploy pipeline easily integratable with existing CI/CD, CLI with built in VPN (allowing you to securely become part of the project's private network, which is what makes the local use of Zerops possible) and other goodies that make Zerops scriptable and extendable.

    We still have quite a road ahead of us, sure, right now we focusing on multiregionality and a CDN services, two main missing features for us to truly go live, other than that we are planning a role system, advanced token management, notification system integratable with third party apps, native support for forwarding logs to third party apps, many many more natively supported services and generally any other feature that could make developer lifes easier.

    That being said, we are already making a heavy use of Zerops ourselves, for various use cases, different environments, all sorts of different CI/CD setups, so I'm quite confident some people could also make a good use of it already. Including screenshots of our own account in Zerops.

    ✌️

    Thanked by 3mrTom martheen Daniel15
  • raviravi Member

    I have received welcome mail for the beta phase of zerops with $100 credit.
    Will explore soon.

    Thanked by 1ales
  • looks half interesting

  • alesales Member
    edited August 2022

    @ravi said:
    I have received welcome mail for the beta phase of zerops with $100 credit.
    Will explore soon.

    Let me know if you need any help :smile: my tip is to start with a recipe (example of a real life project setup, usually a database, API and a frontend app), even if you like to "skip the tutorial" and don't find a recipe that 100% matches your tech stack. It's the best way to painlessly get a project running, explore Zerops through it and get a decent idea of what Zerops does. No need to install any CLIs, no need to setup / modify repositories. The application that gets deployed with the recipe will also guide you to further exploration - here's an example of a one https://app-2027f.app.zerops.io

    FYI just to reiterate the Contabo x Zerops situation, there are two separate instances of Zerops running in paralel:

    zerops.io
    - standalone, with its own credit / user system (and ability to log in with your GitHub / GitLab account)
    - hosted from our own high tech datacenter in EU / Prague

    contabo.com/en/zerops
    - integrated with Contabo (you login through your Contabo account)
    - hosted from Contabo's St. Louis datacenter

    Both are currently free and will eventually converge into the main branch at zerops.io

    And that $100 credit is just a safeguard against abuse, should you manage to spend it within the beta just let me know, we'll pump you some more credits.

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