UPDATED 09:37 EDT / JULY 31 2015

NEWS

ElasticHosts launches Spring.io, a pay-as-you-go cloud container service

Cloud hosting provider ElasticHosts Ltd. has lifted the lid off of Springs.io, a container-based cloud infrastructure service that offers “elastic capacity scaling” with pay-per-use billing. The company claims the service is priced lower than the equivalent virtualization-based cloud services offered by companies like Amazon Web Services.

Springs.io is based on ElasticHosts’s container tech, which scales automatically to give customers the capacity they need in real-time. The service can boot up containers in less than two seconds when capacity demands increase, and users needn’t worry about the overheads of virtualization.

ElasticHosts works out its usage fees based on actual workloads. It prices processing at $0.008 per MHz used per hour, while 1 GB of RAM costs $0.011 per hour. As for storage, that costs $0.25 per GB of SSD used, per month. The company gives users 1 TB of data transfer free of charge, before charging additional transfers at a rate of $0.05 per GB. Users can also purchase a static public IP address for $2 a month.

Customers also have the option of limiting how much their apps can automatically scale. The limits start at 500 and go all the way up to 20,000, and 256MB to 32GB of RAM.

Springs.io doesn’t actually use Docker or Linux Containers, but instead relys on a similar Linux kernel for control and container isolation. Whereas Docker and Linux Containers are essentially application containers with a focus on simplifying portability and managing dependencies in micro-services architecture, Springs.io provides operating system containers that focus on usage-based billing and reactive auto-scaling. The service is built entirely on high-speed SSD storage to ensure the best possible performance.

Richard Davies, founder of Springs.io, said the idea is to give Linux developers, agencies and SMBs an easy to use, economical and highly scalable hosting service. Containers are, therefore, the best technology to suit this purpose.

“We have been listening to the market and what we are hearing is that people are craving simplicity,” Davies said in a statement. “They just want to be able to sign up to a service without having to choose instance sizes or worry about over-paying, just as you would with your gas or electricity. While some customers need greater support and configuration, many don’t, and we wanted to provide a service for users that are looking for a more simplistic offering. “

Springs.io’s service isn’t all that different to what ElasticHosts already offers with its own Elastic Containers product, notes Computer Weekly. But the company seems to think that by launching Springs.io as a separate identity, it’ll be in a position to better capitalize on the growing interest in containers.

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