Clever Cloud was founded nearly fifteen years ago, out of a desire to innovate in the field of web hosting and deployment, by offering a reliable range of services in a simple, straightforward way. As a result, we became Europe’s leading provider of PaaS services, attracting developers and key accounts alike.
More importantly, we are unique in offering these solutions on our own infrastructure, as well as on-premise or through various partners around the world. We now do this with ISO 9001 and 27001:2022 certification, with HDS and SecNumCloud as our next targets.
Over the years, our company and its product range evolved and expanded. But we’ve never compromised with our original vocation: innovation. That’s why, alongside the continuous improvement of our services, interfaces and integrations, we are massively investing in the development of our future, in solutions that will meet our customers’ needs ever more effectively, and over which we have full control.
This is where the independence and sovereignty of our offering comes in. That’s why we’ve decided to build our own infrastructures, to choose a GNU/Linux system to which we actively contribute, and to use it on both our servers and our network equipment. It’s also why we’ve spent the last few years developing Materia, a range of serverless, easy-to-use, pay-as-you-go products.
Materia Functions: WASM stands for compatibility and efficiency
To achieve this, we didn’t hesitate to create our own low-level virtualization and function execution layer. We wanted to maintain our strong isolation criteria by setting up virtual machines that we activate as close as possible to the CPU. We also wanted to be able to achieve good performance while opening up to a wide range of languages, rather than simply relying on v8 at the risk of focusing almost exclusively on JavaScript.
So we opted instead for a solution that leverages the capabilities of the WebAssembly standard (WASM/WASI), which can be used with a wide range of languages, from Go to Zig as well as C, Rust or AssemblyScript… and of course JavaScript.
After a successful first demo of our Tech Preview in Barcelona at the WASM.io conference last month, we‘ll be demonstrating again at Devoxx Paris, which takes place at the Palais des Congrès from April 17 to 19. Feel free to come and talk to us about it, and let us know if you’re interested in taking part in the next stages of development of this product, which will be progressively opened up over the course of the year.
MateriaDB KV: our distributed, multi-protocol, serverless revolution
Another major innovation from our team is the new MateriaDB offering. To achieve this, we have designed our own serverless databases, built on the FoundationDB open source transactional engine, used, for example, by Apple for its iCloud services. We are also an active member of its community, participating in the development of its ecosystem.
Distributed and robust, notably thanks to its high simulation capacity, it has enabled us to design and build a whole range of services to meet the different needs expressed by our customers in recent years. Our approach is always open and resilient, with deployment across multiple availability zones, compatibility with existing protocols and clients, and pay-as-you-go billing.
The first to be publicly announced is MateriaDB KV, which, as its name suggests, is a key-value database. To create one within your Clever Cloud account, you have no instance size to choose, no storage capacity to worry about. We simply provide you with a host address, a port and a token (based on the Biscuit technology to which we actively contribute), and you’re ready to go!
You can then send us your keys and their contents. They will be synchronously replicated in our three Paris datacenters. So you don’t have to set up any complex configurations to ensure high availability, or even activate any options. MateriaDB KV is resilient by design! And it adapts to individual needs, as it’s billed on a pay-as-you-go basis. It’s the perfect solution for hobbyists, seasoned developers and key accounts alike.
Redis API compatibility… to start with
We didn’t want this innovation to come at the cost of complex configuration, requiring the use of special clients and ORMs. That’s why we’ve developed MateriaDB KV’s own compatibility layers.
To “talk” to it, you don’t need a special API or tools specific to Clever Cloud. You can use it with existing solutions for DynamoDB, GraphQL or Redis. The latter is the first of the compatibility layers available in our test phase. It enables customers using a Redis instance for their application to migrate to MateriaDB KV with just a few clicks in their interface or via Clever Tools.
This solution will be publicly demonstrated for the first time at Devoxx Paris, which takes place at the Palais des Congrès from April 17 to 19. It will then be rapidly made available to all our customers in alpha. Feel free to come and talk to us about it, and the other Materia services we’ll be offering later this year.
We’ll also be demonstrating other upcoming new features, such as our Keycloak-as-a-Service solution in partnership with Please Open It, and celebrating the release of version 1.0 of our in-house, open source load balancer, developed in Rust: SŌZU!
To keep up to date with our regular developments, be sure to follow our Changelog (via its RSS feed), or this blog. But also follow us on LinkedIn or X/Twitter.