DiscountASP.NET is announcing its entry into the Platform-as-a-Service space with the beta launch of a new .NET PaaS we are calling Snapp.
At this time, we are in a beta phase and developers can sign up for FREE to test out the PaaS platform and provide us with feedback and suggestions. During the beta, we will continually be introducing new features and will be improving the system.
What is Snapp?
Our PaaS solution is an elastic cloud hosting platform for .NET applications. Snapp provides a scalable hosting platform where developers can increase or decrease the number of workers, but there is much more…
What is different about Snapp?
1. Deployment Options – Developers can deploy applications the way they want to without a learning curve. Snapp supports web standard FTP, web deploy, GIT, and Team Foundation Server.
2. Staging Done Right – Snapp is the first PaaS that comes with a configurable staging and production environment for every application. Developers can actually test their applications before it goes live.
3. Exception Management – Snapp comes with an exception management system to help developers identify issues with their application.
4. Easy Rollback – Eveytime an application is published from staging to production, we’ll keep a snapshot of the application in a repository. If anything unforseen should happen in production, rolling back to a previously working snapshot is just a click away.
Why launch a .NET PaaS?
Our focus at DiscountASP.NET from inception has been to empower .NET developers with hosting solutions. So we’ve been providing cutting-edge shared hosting solutions for .NET developers for the past decade.
But — we’ve also seen the needs of developers change over the last decade. And we will evolve too.
We’ve seen improvements in back-end cloud hosting technologies and changes in application lifecycle management with the adoption of a more agile and continuous development rhythm, and the increase in development activities in mobile web applications. When we asked ourselves what kind of cloud hosting solution we could offer to help make developers lives more productive, we kept converging on a Platform-as-a-Service solution.
Underlying Technology
Snapp is built on top of Antares, code name for Azure Services for Windows Servers. Antares is the same technology Microsoft uses to run Azure Web Sites, which is being made available to hosting partners. We’ve been working with Microsoft over the past year+ on Antares.
Call to Action -We need your help
Thank you for reading this blog post to the very end. Please help us by signing up for our FREE beta and taking Snapp for a spin. What we have here is still bare bones and please excuse the dust. We have plenty of great ideas cooking to make Snapp really rock and we could use all the feedback from you to help us improve Snapp and help prioritize the feature enhancements, to ultimately make your work more productive.
Hi guys, this sounds awesome – and we love DASP. But can you help us understand how this is different from using Azure directly? What ‘value added’ services are you thinking of? i.e. what’s the benefit of the ‘middle-man’ – is it the tech support services you provide above ‘going at it alone’ with an azure VM?
Thanks, looking forward to hearing about your plans!
It’s different right now in four ways; 1) Snapp is easier to use than Azure – a lot easier, 2) we provide a separate staging area where you can do real pre-launch testing, 3) we provide free support, which you’ll pay (a lot) for if you use Azure, 3) we’re not Microsoft.
Only kind of kidding about the last one. But it bears stating for those who find Azure complex and costly (a cost that’s often unpredictable), who don’t want to deal with Microsoft or don’t exactly have mountains of faith in them (because of things like all of Azure going down because someone at Microsoft forgot to renew an SSL certificate).
We have a road map that tells a bit about what’s upcoming (http://snapphq.com/Cloud-Hosting/PaaS/Roadmap), but some things we’re not talking about because we don’t want to tip the hat too much.
The changes to DiscountASP.NET itself are upcoming, and unrelated to Snapp.