We’re excited to announce that Galaxy Professional, an enhanced tier of containers that includes built-in APM, is now available to all Galaxy customers.
Bringing APM to Galaxy
When we learned last December that Kadira APM was shutting down, we put together a plan to answer two questions: 1. What could we do right away to ensure everyone would have access to a critical Meteor APM tool; and 2. Were there opportunities this change might create for the Meteor developer community in the long term?
After acquiring the Kadira codebase, we considered keeping it standalone in its current form, but we ultimately decided that path wasn’t right for us. For one thing, Kadira’s SaaS infrastructure, monitoring, and billing systems are completely different from Galaxy’s, so we would be taking on twice the operational burden instead of leveraging our existing systems. More importantly, we felt there was an opportunity to deliver something really great for our thousands of Galaxy customers — a fully integrated APM option that we could keep investing in.
What we’re releasing today is the first step on that path. We’ve tied Kadira’s core instrumentation into Galaxy’s container-based model and utility billing system. Every app on Galaxy is now a click away from great APM features like subscription timing and error tracking. Longer term, we’re going to integrate additional APM functionality deeper into Meteor core and Galaxy, roll out alerting features based on it, and investigate what else we can do from this starting point. We’d love to hear your ideas. For those who want to roll their own Kadira APM solution, we also released the original Kadira source code as an open source distribution last week.
This plan is an example of how we think about our role as the company behind Meteor. You can count on us to take care of infrastructure details and have your back on the platform, so you can focus on writing great JavaScript and building your business.
Introducing Galaxy Professional
Launching today, Galaxy Professional is a new type of container that includes must-have features like for critical apps, like built-in Meteor APM and IP whitelisting, all in one place. You can turn on Galaxy Professional containers and get access to APM with a single click for any app in your account. It’s all ready to go — as part of an early access rollout, some of our largest Galaxy customers have already been running their most important apps on Professional containers.
If you have an important app that needs features like performance monitoring, we recommend running it on Galaxy Professional. The basic Galaxy functionality you have come to rely on will be called Galaxy Essentials going forward. You can select either Essentials or Professional containers to run each app in your account. Going forward, we’ll make investments in both Galaxy Essentials and Professional. New features that make it easier to deploy and reliably run apps will go into Essentials; features that only make sense for critical apps will go into Professional.
Extra Security & Support
Galaxy Professional also includes IP whitelisting, a key feature to secure connections between Meteor apps and external services including MongoDB hosts or 3rd-party API providers. Since IP whitelisting has non-trivial costs for us to deliver, it will only be available for apps deployed on Galaxy Professional containers going forward. If you are already using IP whitelisting today as part of your application, please email support@meteor.com and let us know — we’ll work on a migration plan with you.
On top of IP whitelisting, Galaxy Pro also comes with prioritized support. Any standard support cases submitted by customers using Galaxy Pro for any app in their account will receive “top of queue” attention by our support team.
Galaxy Pricing
Galaxy Essentials pricing remains unchanged at $0.08 per gb-ecu hour across all container sizes and regions.
Galaxy Professional is priced at $0.11 per gb-ecu hour across all container sizes in all regions (US, EU, APAC). Similar to Essentials, you can also pre-pay annually for Galaxy Professional container capacity to save 20–30% off pay-as-you-go rates. Contact Galaxy sales to learn more about pre-paid options for either Essentials or Professional container capacity.
Start using Galaxy Professional for your important apps with a single click to get built-in APM and enhanced security and support!
Introducing Galaxy Professional & Built-in APM was originally published in Meteor Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.