Jetware is an automation tool to configure and manage server applications, such as databases, web servers, application servers, popular web applications such as Wordpress, Drupal, Redmine, and Confluence, or your own created applications.
Jetware includes a runtime environment manager, a software applications collection, and a runtime environment constructor (online service and a command line utility). The online services and the package collections are provided free of charge.
The web application runtime environment is supplied as an appliance, which comprises a complete set of all the programs and libraries used by this application. Different applications may use different programs, versions, or configurations — a runtime environment can be fine-fitted to meet the requirements of each.
All programs in the Jetware collection are optimized for web-oriented jobs and configured to interact with each other. The appliance is ready for immediate use just after the installation and it requires neither additional software nor further configuration.
You can create your own new appliance with online constructor by selecting programs and versions required, or choose a ready-made appliance from an appliance public directory. You can also select an existing appliance and adjust it to your requirements, adding the new necessary programs or changing the version of the programs included.
An appliance can be reused again or can be shared with other Jetware users.
The configuration of an appliance is stored in a YAML-document inside the appliance and can be used at any time to reproduce the appliance from scratch.
With the help of Jetware’s constructors and appliances, startups and web developers can create and deploy server software stacks to use in their applications and websites. Self-constructing and self-administration tools eliminate manual operations and settings and allow complex software configurations to be easily built.
Businesses, organizations, and website owners use Jetware constructors and appliances for customizing or installing server or web applications on the cloud or office servers. The application is already pre-configured and ready for immediate use, including self-management, self-monitoring, and self-healing components. This helps users without technical knowledge deploy and run complex applications.
Software developers integrate the Jetware runtime environment manager and Jetware Appliance Builder with their own continuous delivery and release automation pipeline. The boot images, virtual machines, and containers then are deployed on the SaaS-provider’s infrastructure, installed on a server or automation appliances, delivered to the customer to on-premises usage, or published in a marketplaces or apps listings. This minimizes manual operations, accelerates the release of product, improves product quality, and facilitates the delivery and deployment of the product to the end user.
An appliance may include only the solution stack: LAMP, LEMP, MEAN, etc, without a web application. In addition to the main components of the stack, you can also include additional programs, for example, you can add MongoDB or memcached to the LAMP. In this case, the user selects the components of the stack, installs the appliance on a server, and then installs and configures the web application.
An appliance can be built fitting the requirements of the target application, for example, Wordpress, Drupal, or Redmine. In this case, the user selects the targets application and its version, whereas all other components are added and configured automatically by the online constructor service. After starting the appliance, we get the target application running and ready.
An appliance may include a number of integrated applications, for example, Redmine + Gitlab + OwnCloud. In this case, when you create an appliance, the constructor prepares a common runtime environment for all installing applications, configures the programs and libraries, and sets up the interconnection of applications. After starting the appliance we get all applications running, ready, and integrated.
Most software in the Jetware collection is represented in multiple versions or compilation parameters. For example, the database packages include MySQL versions 5.1, 5.5, 5.6, and 5.7; MariaDB versions 5.5, 10.0, 10.1, and 10.2; Percona 5.5, 5.6, 5.7, and WebScaleSQL; for PHP there are versions 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 7.0, and 7.1. Many other server programs and libraries also are available in multiple versions
This attribute allows us to select the combination of programs and libraries that best meets the application requirements. If you have an old project requiring PHP 5.2 and MySQL 5.1, then you can create the environment with these versions. If you are developing a new project and you need the latest version of the software, then you can construct the appliance with PHP 7.0 and MariaDB 10.1.
We track and release updates for all programs in our collection. You do not need to mess with “configure make install” and recall how you have built the program every time you urgently need to install a new version. You will receive fresh updates from our collection for each package.
Thanks to the developers, providing new patches for bugs and vulnerabilities, and companies like Atomic Corp., we can also maintain and update legacy software versions.
The programs and libraries from the Jetware collection are independent of the operating system runtime environment and of the programs from the repositories. Jetware appliances can be installed both on new or already long-running servers without the risk of conflict or disrupting.
We focus primarily on web-based applications — websites’ frontend and backend, backend for mobile applications, and intranet services. Therefore, we have optimized and pre-configured appliances and software packages for this load profile.
Of course, you can use the appliance and Jetware programs for any other purpose.
The Jetware runtime environment is organized for more efficient use of CPU, RAM, and storage systems. This both reduces the consumption of computing resources and increases the speed of programs compared with the standard packages from the OS distributions. As a result, it reduces the cost of hardware and hosting up to 15–80% and improves the responsiveness of websites and mobile applications.
Appliances and programs are compatible with any Linux operating system and any hardware based on Intel x86_64 architecture. A 64-bit mode kernel version >= 2.6.32 is enough.
You can run the most modern PHP stack 7 + MariaDB 10.1 on a server with CentOS 6, or run legacy PHP 5.2 application on a server with Ubuntu 16.04.
There is also a collection of packages for older kernels and for other architectures. However, they are mostly experimental and are not ready for production use.
The Jetware appliances are easy to use. They are available in different implementations. The appliance can be one-click installed into any Linux operating system using an automatic script installer. The appliance can be downloaded and run as a virtual machine image of VMWare, VirtualBox, or KVM/OpenStack. The appliance can be used as a base in your Vagrant-project, Docker, or LXC container. The appliance can be launched from AMI on Amazon EC2, or as a droplet in DigitalOcean.
An appliance works the same way in all implementations. You can use the same appliance everywhere and see your application working in the same runtime environment.
For example, your developing site on Drupal will work in the same environment in a Vagrant-project on your laptop, in a testing Docker-container on a server in the office, in the VMWare Player on the customer’s desktop, and at the production website on Amazon EC2 cloud.
In addition to regular servers, Jetware appliances are designed to operate on failover clusters and in the cloud with instances on demand. It’s a handy tool for DevOps’ arsenal for implementing the immutable infrastructure pattern. Using appliances simplifies the upgrade and maintenance of either a large number of homogeneous servers, or multiple, small specialized groups of servers.
You can easily test the new runtime environment on a virtual machine with a new appliance before upgrading your production server.
You can easily move your application with the entire runtime environment across a dedicated server, virtual machine, VPS and cloud platform Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, or Microsoft Azure. You can quickly deploy a copy at the new location as a disaster response. You can freely change providers.
