After many years of having a blast at Quest Software – which has been a great employer for me, supporting the craziest ideas like betting on that monad thing, you know 
– I finally decided to push myself way beyond my comfort zone and join a start-up.
As you probably know, for the last few years I have been deeply fascinated by the cloud transformation happening to the industry. And if you know me, you probably have also noticed my constant desire to be on the edge of technology and entrepreneurial spirit. These finally collided with Jelastic – one of the most exciting start-ups I have ever seen.
I have for a long time thought that current cloud computing is somewhat broken. On the one end of the spectrum, you can use IaaS like Amazon Web Services that can surely give you lots of VMs fast, but then expect you to spend hours being the admin configuring and maintaining them. On the other end, you can go with, say, Google App Engine or Heroku, but in return for the admin tasks lifted, you get tons of restrictions which pretty much make you re-write your applications. And then you get stuck with the platform vendor and “hoster” being the same company – so if you don’t like the service or it is not available in your geography – you are stuck.
These limitations always struck me as false dichotomy, and now Jelastic is trying to make meaning here, offering a PaaS that indeed does all the environment configuration (including tricky stuff like setting up high-availability clusters with session replication, etc.). Yet, there are no limitations or restrictions: you still gets real actual standard application servers, have full control over their configuration, can upload any additional libraries that you need, and so on – so no code changes are required.
And there is no lock-in: both because of the standard nature of the environment, and because the platform and the service are decoupled. Jelastic follows the “Android model” – we give the platform to hosters around the world who then provide it to their customers. So if you don’t like the service or need a hoster in another country – you just pick the provider that suits you best.
And finally it is just a great platform: fast and efficient, and getting rave reviews from users.
This quick demo shows it in action:
Now you can hopefully see my reasons for joining Jelastic! 
If you are a fan of Quest’s PowerShell work – please keep being one – as I mentioned recently, Adam Driscoll is your guy! Watch his blog like you used to watch this one.
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