Zerops Documentation
Zerops is a developer-first Platform-as-a-Service, running on bare metal from a top-tier datacenter, with every part built from scratch. Zerops aims to be the perfect mix of developer experience, flexibility, scalability and affordability, making it a great fit for applications of any size, complexity and traffic.
Natively supported services
Runtimes, web servers & Linux containers
For these services Zerops provides pre-prepared build and runtime images and flexible pipeline that allows you to modify them and build your applications.
Databases, search engines & message brokers
These services are fully managed by Zerops and offered in highly available and single container modes.
Storages
Fully managed S3 compatible storage running on a separate infrastructure and persistent disk that can be mounted to multiple services.
Quicklinks
CLI used to trigger pipelines, connect to VPN and create and manage projects and services.
Configuration file placed to your repository, telling Zerops how to build and start your app.
YAML format that allows you to creates templates or projects and services
Feature highlights
Four concepts that play together to make Zerops developer-first and live up to the claim "no matter the size or environment".
➡️ Custom dedicated infrastructure deployed with each project
Zerops is made of three levels: project -> service -> container. For each project Zerops deploys dedicated core services, these consist of:
- L3 balancer with a firewall and unique IP addresses assigned to it, this serves as the main entry point from the internet,
- Logger and Statistics containers that gather logs and resource metrics from all services inside the project and allow for log forwarding
- L7 load balancer that handles and routes http traffic, SSL termination and SSL certificates
User services (which consist of one or more containers) inside the project share a private network created with VXLAN, have resources isolated with cgroups and can securely communicate with each other simply by using the hostname and ports and read and reference each other's environment variables.
You get a fully managed, professional infrastructure setup that will scale no matter how much traffic you get and deals with all the networking, balancing and security stuff, so you can just focus on your actual applications.
➡️ Granular resource configuration, autoscaling and high availability of services
Zerops has fully automatic horizontal and vertical scaling with configuration steps as small as 0.25 MB RAM and 1 CPU core. Your runtime services can go from a single container with 0.25 RAM and 1 CPU core to 10 containers each with 32 GB RAM and 10 CPU cores and then back in a matter of minutes. At the same time, all database and storage services are offered in well-crafted setups that go through performance optimizations while scaling and are available in both non-HA (single container) and high availability (multiple containers and balancers) modes.
You won't ever overprovision or underprovision your resources and your services will always have the exact resources they need. There won't be any cutting corners like sharing too few CPU cores between too many services. You will be able to rely on professional, reliable and highly available database setups with auto-repairing abilities that will scale along with your applications.
➡️ Full Linux OS containers with a powerful, flexible build and deploy pipeline
Zerops uses Incus to create containers, which means that you get a full Linux OS, either Ubuntu or Alpine, depending on your choices. This provides the perfect middle ground between a containerized process (Docker) and a full-fledged VM (Proxmox). Zerops provides build and runtime bases for all the popular runtime technologies and a powerful and flexible pipeline that allows you to modify and cache both the build and runtime images. This circumvents the need for Docker registries. The pipeline can be triggered either automatically, by connecting the service with GitHub or GitLab repositories, or manually using our CLI - either for triggering from your machine, or from any existing CI/CD process.
You get a built-in powerful and flexible pipeline to modify build and runtime images and deploy your code, without any downtime. It can be used standalone or easily plugged into any existing CI/CD process.
➡️ Pricing model that doesn't get in the way of good development practices
"Simple and predictable pricing"... is what others say and what we actually do. In Zerops, cost per hardware resource (CPU, RAM, Disk) is 3-5x cheaper than with popular alternatives. And there are no plans, no feature tiers, no fees for seats. PaaS is just hardware with a cherry and bow on top, so why would we charge you for anything else but hardware resources?
You get a powerful managed platform with all the best features unlocked for a price that's nearly on par with VPS. You can create as many environments as you need, even one for each developer working on a project, all with the same infrastructure as production, so they can utilize Zerops for their local development. No more "but it works on my machine".