A lucid assessment: Europe has delegated its critical infrastructures for too long

I am delighted to see President Macron expressing himself so clearly and convincingly on the need for European digital sovereignty. I particularly welcome his clear-sightedness in acknowledging that ‘I think we have made a very serious mistake in not having a truly European cloud. And what's more, we need to get back to the task’. This realisation at the highest level of government sends out a strong signal to all players in the European digital sector. However, more than getting back to the task, it is the European vision of what a cloud is that needs to be reviewed. If it were just a question of infrastructure, the cloud giants would be AOL and Verizon. But today, the hyperscalers are Microsoft, Google and Amazon, companies where software is at the centre. The Americans have understood this, and it's vital that Europe does too: the cloud isn't just about servers, it's also, and above all, about software.

The President also rightly pointed out that ‘it was so comfortable to be hand in glove with the Americans’, but that ‘we cannot depend on a few American companies to have a real cloud. Because this is also in the general European interest. It's a necessity.’ His phrase ‘there is no such thing as happy vassalage’ must become our leitmotiv in the construction of a technologically independent and sovereign Europe.

This declaration is perfectly in line with the signing of the contract for the ‘software and trusted digital solutions’ sector, adopted by Philippe Baptiste, Marc Ferracci, Clara Chappaz and Michel Paulin, whose objectives are to promote the development of sovereign digital infrastructures, to strengthen training in trusted digital technologies, and to create value and encourage innovation on a French scale.

The cloud war is not lost, it's just beginning

Contrary to what many people are saying today, the cloud war is not over for Europe. It has only just begun, and President Macron's statement is a powerful reminder of this. It's true that the American giants have taken a considerable lead, but the history of technology shows us that nothing can ever be taken for granted.

It's crucial to add one essential nuance: European skills, technologies and cloud solutions already exist. It's not a question of rebuilding everything from scratch, but rather of making better use of it, providing better support and better coordination. Solid, innovative and committed players are already working every day to offer a credible alternative to non-European solutions.
The new challenges of data sovereignty, cybersecurity and strategic autonomy are opening up a new phase in this technological battle. Europe has all the cards in its hand - talent, infrastructure, software, markets - to build a credible and sovereign alternative, provided we believe in it collectively and give ourselves the means to do so.

An action plan to turn this ambition into reality

President Macron said: ‘This is a strategic awakening. We must therefore regain this strategic autonomy, which is essential, everywhere, in every segment of our research and industry.’

To turn this vision into reality, it is essential to benefit from :

Clever Cloud already committed to building a sovereign European cloud

At Clever Cloud, we haven't just been waiting for this strategic awakening, we've been committed to being the architects of it for several years, along with many members of the ecosystem. We are actively contributing to numerous European collaborative initiatives such as CollabNext and Hyper Open X. We are also working on the emergence of European software and hardware solutions through recent calls for projects that we have launched.

The Sorbonne appeal must become a binding European agenda

This speech must not simply be another moment of communication. It must inaugurate a decade of coordinated action to ensure that our research, our data and our innovation are hosted, processed and governed in Europe. Not in Seattle, not in Palo Alto, not in Shanghai. In AI, in the cloud, in code archiving, Europe must be a player, not a spectator. It must fund its own laboratories of excellence, its start-ups, its supercomputers, and above all its digital commons.

France has everything it takes to play a leading role in this European dynamic. The time has come to move from words to deeds, by aligning our public policies with this strong ambition expressed by the President of the Republic.
Many of us are ready to play our full part in this fight. But Europe must finally take action.

Quentin Adam, CEO – Clever Cloud

Since we founded Clever Cloud in 2011, we’ve never changed our prices. For more than a decade (a record?), we’ve always preferred to optimize our costs and technologies so that you can enjoy both the highest quality services and the most competitive prices possible. We’re very proud to have achieved this, and to be able to count on your loyalty. 

We wanted to maintain this pricing policy for as long as possible, but the general increase in prices from our suppliers – particularly energy suppliers, and more generally the very high inflation due to the international context, is not sparing Clever Cloud and our employees. It was no longer reasonable to maintain this policy of locked-in prices. We have therefore decided to modify our prices to ensure that we can continue to provide the level of service and support you expect, and to develop our infrastructure, features and new products that you will be using over the coming months.

Our new pricing structure also enables us to improve the overall consistency of our prices. 

Some of you will see your bills drop, especially on higher-capacity plans. Conversely, you will find that the biggest increases are concentrated on certain managed services, in particular ElasticSearch instances, for which we are re-establishing consistency with our infrastructure costs and the rest of our catalog. The increase is much more limited for most PostgreSQL, MySQL and MongoDB plans. Overall, we wanted to ensure a certain homogeneity in order to maintain competitive prices.

You’ll note that Cellar (object storage) prices are currently unchanged. In fact, we’re working on a product enhancement that will enable us to improve service quality here too, while offering you more competitive rates, which will involve a reduction in its cost over the coming months. You will then be able to benefit from the economies of scale made possible by our investments in new infrastructures.

Our commitment remains unchanged: to guarantee the utmost transparency on our prices, and to provide you with the best possible predictability and control of your application hosting costs. Using Clever Cloud is FinOps by design. What’s more, by activating auto-scalability on your applications, you can automatically reduce the size and number of your virtual machines when they are less in demand, and thus adjust your invoices as closely as possible to your consumption needs, taking advantage of our per-second pricing model. 

The new price scale will come into force on August 1, 2023, and will therefore apply automatically to invoices issued on or after September 1, 2023, with the exception of Enterprise contracts, which are subject to special conditions. 

If, as we hope, you decide to renew your contract, you don’t need to do anything to accept these new conditions – just continue to use Clever Cloud!

Our sales and technical support teams are at your disposal to help you optimize your choices and answer any questions you may have. Don’t hesitate to contact them.

Paris, Nantes - France, January 17, 2023 – Clever Cloud and Scaleway unite to offer a PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) solution hosted in DC5, one of the most energy and water-efficient data centers in Europe, built and run by Scaleway. The two major European cloud players make it possible to deploy websites and web applications in record time, without prior knowledge of cloud technologies.

Web Platform - powered by Clever Cloud: making the deployment of web applications faster with a managed and sovereign service

The goal of Clever Cloud and Scaleway joining forces is to offer developers, startups, SMEs, and agencies a high performance and sovereign alternative to automate the deployment of their web applications in a sustainable ecosystem.

Web Platform - powered by Clever Cloud allows developers to deploy code directly via pushes to GitHub, using any runtime, and does not require knowledge of server and infrastructure management.

Thanks to a number of add-ons, including services such as managed databases and storage, Web Platform allows developers to scale their web applications in record timing, and considerably reduce their time-to-market.

“Web Platform allows users to benefit from the compatibility of the two providers’ catalogs, and the increased possibilities of this bold, innovative and sovereign offering. We are delighted to be working with Scaleway once more, and we’ve built a sustainable partnership not only to serve the ecosystem and our clients, but also to respond to market needs.” Quentin Adam, CEO, Clever Cloud.

Bringing together two key European cloud players

The launch of Web Platform enhances the catalogs of both Scaleway and Clever Cloud - two companies known for their commitment to building an alternative, European, sovereign, and sustainable cloud.

DC5, Scaleway’s next generation data center, is integrated into the Clever Cloud offering, allowing developers to deploy their applications in a carbon neutral data center which uses 30-40% less energy and 90% less water than a traditional data center.

Web Platform - powered by Clever Cloud completes Scaleway’s range of managed services and products. Scaleway clients will now be able to considerably accelerate their website launches thanks to a powerful, sustainable, and sovereign offer.

“This partnership unites the complementary strengths of Scaleway and Clever Cloud. The new offer is another milestone toward the simplified adoption of the cloud in a sovereign environment which respects our planet.” Gaspard Plantrou, Senior Vice President PaaS, Scaleway.

About Scaleway 

Founded in 1999, Scaleway, the cloud of choice, helps developers and businesses to build, deploy and scale applications to any infrastructure. Located in Paris, Amsterdam and Warsaw, Scaleway’s complete cloud ecosystem is used by 25,000+ businesses, including European startups, who choose Scaleway for its multi-AZ redundancy, smooth developer experience, carbon-neutral data centers and native tools for managing multi-cloud architectures.

With fully managed offerings for bare metal, containerization and serverless architectures, Scaleway brings choice to the world of cloud computing, offering customers the ability to choose where their customer’s data resides, to choose what architecture works best for their business, and to choose a more responsible way to scale.

For more information: https://www.scaleway.com/en/web-platform-powered-by-clever-cloud/

About Clever Cloud

Founded in 2010, Clever Cloud is a company based in Nantes specializing in IT automation. It creates and provides the software building blocks necessary for the flexible deployment of applications on self-service SaaS architectures. Its clients include such big names as Airbus, AXA, Caisse d’Épargne, Cegid, Docaposte, MAIF, McDonald’s, Solocal, SNCF, TBWA, etc.

For more information: https://www.clever.cloud/contact/

Strasbourg, Nantes, Grenoble, Paris – France, October 17, 2022: 2CRSi (Euronext Paris ISIN code : FR0013341781), a designer and manufacturer of high-performance energy-efficient servers, Clever Cloud, a European provider of automation and optimization solutions for websites and applications hosting, Kalray (Euronext Growth Paris: ALKAL), a leading provider of hardware and software technologies for high-performance, data-centric computing markets, from Cloud to Edge and Vates, an open source software company specializing in secure and open source virtualization, are pleased to announce that the ReNESENS project, led by Vates, has been awarded by the French AMI Cloud: France 2030 Investment Plan - "Supporting the supply of solutions for the industry of the future". The aim of ReNESENS is to develop solutions for Cloud and Edge data center infrastructure around a new class of processors called DPU (Data Processing Unit) and innovative virtualization and software-defined technologies.

The speed, complexity and quantity of data handled by data centers is exploding historically on the Cloud and more recently at the Edge. New classes of equipment are needed based on new hardware and software foundations to provide more efficient, power-optimized, and more open data center infrastructures.

The ReNESENS project is bringing together some of the most advanced French companies with unique expertise in the new class of DPU data processors, virtualization software, highly efficient servers and innovative data center architecture; Vates, Clever Cloud, Kalray and 2CRSi. The project intends to develop an innovative and attractive sovereign proposition, for both end users and the ecosystem of data center players.

Olivier Lambert, President and Founder of Vates, said: “Data centers are more crucial now than ever before, meaning the need for innovative and very efficient systems management and portability. In this regard, virtualization plays a key role; ReNESENS is a project of strategic importance to develop the next generation of data centers, both at the core and at the Edge. In this project, Vates will work closely with its partners to integrate XCP-ng into Kalray’s DPU architecture and ensure its stack works well with Clever Cloud’s network tools. It will also deliver tightly optimized appliances that combine the best of Kalray, Clever Cloud technologies and 2CSRi’s high-end and Edge computing hardware solutions.”

Alain Wilmouth, CEO of 2CRSi, said: “Innovation is thedriving force of 2CRSi. Our contribution to the ReNESENS project is strategic for the group. Working on technology sovereignty is key to success in a disoriented post-COVID world. This project, entirely developed in France with our partners Kalray, Clever Cloud and Vates, will change the course of how we manage and power infrastructure. This solution is designed to solve two major issues of our industry; cloud security and energy savings in the data center environment.”

Éric Baissus, CEO of Kalray, said: “DPU processors are a game changer for data center infrastructures.  They offer a unique opportunity to build more flexible, scalable, energy-efficient solutions. As the European DPU leader, we are delighted to work closely with 2CRSi, Clever Cloud and Vates as part of the ReNESENS project to build the next generation of data center infrastructures.”

Quentin Adam, CEO of Clever Cloud, said: “We are pleased to participate in the ReNESENS project, which will lead to the emergence of an innovative network traffic management solution, in both hardware and software, that will improve the technical and energy efficiency of our infrastructures while reducing costs. Clever Cloud will bring all its expertise to this initiative and to its partners 2CRSi, Kalray and Vates. Working together, French technology players will create tomorrow's Cloud tools.”

The ReNESENS project is structured around 4 main areas:

• DPU and Virtualization: Usage of DPU to improve performance and power efficiency of virtualization and logical isolation.
• Orchestration: Orchestration with the development of an isolation system for the container execution environment.
• Software-defined networking and storage: The use of DPUs to achieve maximum network performance via open source, secure and high-performance software routing (Reverse Proxy) as well as storage protocols and services.
• Hardware integration: The use of DPUs within a new generation of data center equipment.

Lasting 3 years, ReNESENS is a multi-million Euro project, with the predicted outcome of a complete range of highly innovative solutions combining hardware and software, enabling customers to use independent, secure and highly sophisticated appliances for their data centers.

About 2CRSi

Founded in Strasbourg (France), 2CRSi group develops, produces and sells customised, high-performance and environmentally friendly servers. In the 2021-22 financial year, the Group generated revenue of €183.6 million. The Group today has approximately 400 employees and markets its offer of innovative solutions (processing, storage and network) in more than 50 countries. 2CRSi has been listed since June 2018 on the regulated market of Euronext in Paris (ISIN Code: FR0013341781). For further information please visit www.2crsi.com

About Clever Cloud

Founded in 2010, Clever Cloud is a company based in Nantes, France, and specializes in IT automation. It creates and provides the software building blocks necessary for the flexible deployment of applications on self-service PaaS architectures. Its clients include major names such as Airbus, AXA, Caisse d’Épargne, Cegid, Docaposte, MAIF, McDonald’s, Solocal, SNCF, TBWA… www.clever.cloud

About Kalray

Kalray (Euronext Growth Paris - ALKAL) is a leading provider of hardware and software technologies and solutions for high-performance, data-centric computing markets, from cloud to edge.

Kalray provides a full range of products to enable smarter, more efficient, and energy-wise data-intensive applications and infrastructures. Its offerings include its unique patented DPU (Data Processing Unit) processors and acceleration cards, as well as its leading-edge software-defined storage and data management solutions. Implemented individually or in combination, Kalray's high-performance solutions allow its customers to improve the efficiency of data centers or design the best solutions in fast-growing sectors such as AI, Media & Entertainment, Life Science, Scientific Research, Edge Computing, Automotive and others.

Founded in 2008 as a spin-off of the well-known French CEA research lab, with corporate and financial investors such as Alliance Venture (Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi), NXP Semiconductors or Bpifrance, Kalray is dedicated through technology, expertise, and passion to offer more: more for a smart world, more for the planet, more for customers and developers. www.kalrayinc.com

About Vates

Since 2012, Vates has been developing open-source solutions dedicated to enterprise-grade server virtualization, ensuring the ability to deliver high performance in both data centers and small infrastructure. As a major player in systems management and delivery, we have been working on our innovative and secure open-source hypervisor based on Xen: XCP-ng, as well as the management, backup and orchestration platform dedicated to XCP-ng and Citrix Hypervisor: Xen Orchestra. vates.fr

A collaboration to deploy next generation storage solutions based on Kalray's DPU processor in Clever Cloud's new Paris data center

Nantes, Grenoble – France, July 5, 2022 - Clever Cloud, a European provider of automation and optimization solutions for websites and applications hosting, and Kalray (Euronext Growth Paris: ALKAL), a leading provider of a new generation of processors and acceleration cards specialized in Intelligent Data Processing from Cloud to Edge, announce a partnership aimed at strengthening the relationship between the two companies for the deployment of next-generation storage solutions.

Clever Cloud, which is currently setting up in a third Parisian data center and strengthening its technical platform, has chosen to partner with French company Kalray and its Flashbox™, a new generation of NVMe storage array that can accommodate up to 24 PCI Express (NVMe) SSDs, for its high-performance storage solution.

Performance, resilience and openness

Without a host CPU (Central Processing Unit), the Flashbox™ leverages K200-LP™ accelerator cards featuring the Coolidge™ DPU (Data Processing Unit) that takes advantage of the unique and patented MPPA® (Massively Parallel Processor Array) architecture developed by Kalray. This chip takes advantage of the power of 80 parallel cores and enables data centers adopting NVMe SSD storage to remove bottlenecks and improve performance, while consuming minimal power and resources.

A unique concept on the market today, the Flashbox™ as proposed by Kalray benefits from ultra-fast interfaces and low power consumption. It can deliver up to 12 million IOPS through a 2x 100 Gb/s network interface and is based on market standards such as Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK), NVMe/TCP or RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCEv1/v2). It will eventually be offered by storage vendors using Kalray cards.

"Kalray's solution meets all our needs and the criteria that are important to us, whether in terms of sovereignty, openness, resilience, energy efficiency or performance", said Quentin Adam, CEO of Clever Cloud.

The Flashbox™ is currently being tested in Clever Cloud's infrastructure and will join its new Paris data center where it will work alongside the latest generation of compute servers Clever Cloud is installing there. It will enable Clever Cloud to offer greater flexibility to its customers in managing storage, but also to support the launch of new offerings.

This is part of the development of Clever Cloud's Storage API, which allows various storage sources, whether local, remote or via third-party cloud service providers, to be simply allocated to the virtual machines that host users' applications. This open, multi-cloud approach is what makes Clever Cloud so successful.

Clever Cloud and Kalray: for a "made in France" R&D

Clever Cloud and Kalray are also partnering in several projects where they are working closely together to leverage Kalray's K200-LP™ cards as accelerators to offload Clever Cloud's network layer functionalities or computations related to the protection and redundancy of data stored within Clever Cloud's servers.

"The collaboration with Kalray is not just about two French companies that have an interest in working together, but about two projects that have, at their heart, the creation of value through innovation, where the partnership is also between the technical teams", adds Steven Le Roux, CTO of Clever Cloud.

“We are very pleased to be working with Clever Cloud, with whom we share common values, both in terms of innovation and the philosophy of our solutions, which are designed to be easy to use, flexible, scalable and open. Kalray has a unique position in Europe in this market of very high-performance and low-power processors. We are proud to be able to build innovative French storage solutions with Clever Cloud and thus contribute to the technological sovereignty of France and Europe”, declares Eric Baissus, President and CEO of Kalray.

The Flashbox™ will be showcased at the upcoming Flash Memory Summit, a major event in the field, from August 2 to 4, 2022, in Santa Clara Convention Center, CA, USA (booth #940).

About Clever Cloud

Founded in 2010, Clever Cloud is a company based in Nantes, France, and specialized in IT automation. It creates and provides the software building blocks necessary for the flexible deployment of applications on self-service PaaS architectures. Its clients include such major names as Airbus, AXA, Caisse d'Épargne, Cegid, Docaposte, MAIF, McDonald's, Solocal, SNCF, TBWA...

About Kalray

Kalray (Euronext Growth Paris - FR0010722819 - ALKAL) is a fabless semiconductor company, a leading provider of a new class of processors, specialized in Intelligent Data Processing from Cloud to Edge. Kalray’s team have created and developed its leading-edge technology and products to help its clients maximize the market possibilities presented by a world dominated by massive, disparate and pervasive data.

Thanks to Kalray’s patented manycore architecture, Kalray’s MPPA® Intelligent Data Processors are natively capable of managing multiple workloads with no bottlenecks to enable smarter, more efficient and energy-wise data-intensive applications. Kalray's offering includes processors, acceleration cards with associated software environment and appliances, allowing its customers to design the best solutions in fast growing sectors such as modern data centers, 5G, AI and Edge Computing, autonomous vehicles and others.

Founded in 2008 as a spin-off of CEA French lab, with investors such as Alliance Venture (Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi), Safran, NXP Semiconductors, CEA and Bpifrance, Kalray is dedicated through technology, expertise and passion to offer more: More for a smart world, more for the planet, more for customers and developers.

We often say that technology is a cycle of concepts. I don’t think so. It’s just that bad ideas are hard to kill, and are rebranded on a regular basis, hyped with marketing bullshit. Today, we will talk about Serverless(TM).

Serverless is quite interesting. In the case of a serverless application there is a server or probably many servers running code. So the « server » we are trying to suppress here is definitely not the hardware we use to power the application. Sorry for those who think we can run a node.js application live in the air, floating to the wind of electrons and running without CPU, RAM, disks… The question is: what is the thing we positively want to suppress on the serverless world if it’s not the server?

Serverless as a Major Performance Tradeoff

What is Serverless then? it’s a function as a service hosting model, where we just upload a small piece of code and sometimes data on a service and get an instant ops-free ability to answer on a URL with the previously uploaded code. And there is the response. There is no server boot, installation, management, routing… Everything is automated. Developers just code, publish code and code is started to respond on a sandboxed environment, its lifecycle bound to the request life.

Destroying context on each HTTP request is, on the vast majority of cases, a very bad performance and stability idea

I do not get this fascination for the request-bound lifecycle of application environment. It’s not the first time it’s shown as a great achievement, there was a myth of short lived containers on a single request… Let me explain my thoughts: the vast majority of applications I see today are made to accept connections from Internet (using HTTP mainly but some others protocols too) and get some data from a database, compute then serve. So, the ability to reach the database quickly is the main performances focus. Latency is still a thing (tell that to DBaaS vendors that don't let you run your code next to the data...). Connecting to the database involves a vast quantity of TCP protocols. And there is the point: establishing a TCP connection is LONG, SLOW and in many cases the most time consuming part of the request.

So, we want to keep the database connection between several web request, and keep the TCP pool awake. We don’t want to destroy the pool on every web requests. And the database server will also work better on stable connections, be much easier to monitor and audit. It’s all built on this paradigm. And yes, I also keep my TCP connections open when I’m working on databases with HTTP based API. Take a look at what we did with warp10.rs, the Rust client we wrote for warp10. Anyway, destroying context on each HTTP request is, in the vast majority of cases, a very bad performance and stability idea.

Better Server Management already happened without Serverless

Some years ago, the consensus around the 12 factors applications made most applications able to launch themselves and able to take care of their lifecycle. The model was in reaction to « application servers ». Because this model is really difficult to scale and it makes business logic and configuration spliced in many environments, and not only in one place. With serverless you actually use an application server. A closed source application server with a strong locking model, all the code produced will lock you to the provider, and the inter-portability will be an illusion, something like JEE application server portability. Except that this one, you can’t install it on your server, even for a bigger price.

Making it easy to deploy and provide sustainability to your application is really important to help developers focus on their value, innovation and to provide a quick feedback loop. The serverless name is not about removing the hardware server, but the server management, the time consuming coordination of managing how a server works. I agree. This is why we created Clever Cloud. it’s to provide application sustainability; the ability to easily deploy and be sure that the future is managed: updates, monitoring, self healing, scalability, security, backups…

The whole server management has to be a commodity, it’s what we deliver at Clever Cloud. And I think it has to be compatible with most applications, new or legacy, and should not impact the application architecture or portability . IT automation is a great idea to help people just send the code and leave the management to software. It solves timing and synchronization constraints between people, gives them the ability to innovate, build, and adapt to the software market more easily than before. Because when someone says "I like serverless", what they say is: I do not want to hear about servers and the all ops stuff, I have work to do.

Conclusion

When you create code, just be sure you are not writing it on someone else's paper, it will hurt sooner or later.

The software industry is quite young, about 30 to 40 years old. Yet massive companies emerged quickly: billion dollar businesses bringing huge social changes. What does it mean to be a developer today, and how did that job evolve these last few years? I think we need to picture this as a global shift within the evolution of productivity.

Image Source: Disney

The software industry is quite young, about 30 to 40 years old. Yet massive companies emerged quickly: billion dollar businesses bringing huge social changes. What does it mean to be a developer today, and how did that job evolve these last few years? I think we need to picture this as a global shift within the evolution of productivity.

Let's start from the beginning.

Tool creation is deeply linked to human progress: to improve our quality of life, manage population growth and create new endeavors. With time, tools are less and less focused on survival.

The evolution of tools is strongly linked to “technology”: better product quality, more variety and quantity. This progress is not linear. It's accelerating. Ray Kurzweil wrote about this in The Age of Spiritual Machines, where he described the “law of accelerating returns”: each step up makes the next step closer (For instance, X-rays paved the ways for many medical breakthroughs).

Industrialization was an important step on production of tools. It brought :

• cost-efficiency
• standard quality
• repeatable processes

All these to produce items in industrial quantity. So some items became something we called commodity.

Commodity is a significant concept. A product becomes a commodity when its quality becomes predictable, repeatable, and it fulfills a common need. Let's take pens, paper or clippers as example. Nobody care about their brand. We need them to be cheap and predictable. Cost efficiency is essential. Imagine the cost of a clipper handcrafted by a blacksmith. That would be a luxury product. And the ROI of this product would be irrelevant: nobody would use it. So our quality of life would be affected (what’s life without clippers? HELL).

In the 19th century, industrialization took over manufacturing. Machinery started replacing most of the human work force. This evolution was driven by the engine replacing the human and animal muscle. During the last decades, computers have been revolutionizing work by replacing humans for intellectual tasks. At first, people delegated simple and repetitive tasks: computation, accounting, price comparison, long-term memory, etc. As the technology moved forward, we started using it for more complex stuff, mapping increasingly convoluted workflows, networking communications.

Now it’s time to delegate more complicated tasks like image recognition, translation or have systems play Go. This is it: as engines industrialized muscle, computers industrialize brains. We are commoditizing of intellectual services.

So now let’s talk about developers.

A software developer’s day to day job is writing code. Modeling specific processes in software, creating tools to industrialize intellectual services, improving value creation and processes to leverage money. With a nice ROI. This is why developer-managed companies became so successful: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Uber, Facebook, etc. They industrialized intellectual services, disrupted markets where brainpower was only human powered, non-scalable and unfocused. This is why Marc Andreessen said that « software is eating the world ».

The industrial revolution of intellectual services is here, and developers like you and me are at the heart of it.

This professional evolution leads to a new way of producing software: more fluent, able to adapt the “brain power tool” faster, in a competitive market. Quickly adapting software makes for adapting businesses. It brings a huge advantage over the competition. The job of a developer must focus on short and continuous delivery, to compete in that market. This leads to a specialization of developers in various combinations of skills and tasks.

Some will go for low level systems. Others, on higher abstraction levels, will manage data or create data pipelining related to core business. That's why “developer” is more of a skill among others specialties, like banking, insurance or food, or people knowing how to model the process in a business domain, optimize and adapt it in a short time.

This is why we need to push forward efficient software factories, from dev to QA to hosting and production. Greatly reducing human and process costs to ship new software will give a decisive competitive edge.

This is why continuous delivery is now necessary.

Because it is driving competition between companies. Because it is reducing cost and time to deliver new software. Because it's providing the finest brain power at exactly the right time, and more important, ahead of others in the market.

The major change in company organization in the last few years is a pivot point. IT services evolved from being a cost center to being a company’s core, with software running the largest part of the business. It is becoming the biggest part of a company’s valuation. As developers, our role is to maintain this core and to make it evolve. We need to bring organisations to the next level, understand market and business logic, and deliver updates to all industrialized intellectual services.

Do you know that hosting is one of the nastiest business out there? Hardware, bandwidth suck up huge amounts of money and energy. But some hosting companies want to give it for free, forever. And people keep asking me “do you have a free plan?”

The problem is quite basic. Hosting the web's "hello world" applications for zero money is not a sustainable business model. Most of all, we should really ask ourselves: is it really useful to humanity? The problem with free offerings is that it’s killing product value: nobody really takes care of a free product.

At Clever Cloud, we have built a great platform.
We’ve worked with developers to help them build great applications, be more efficient, and sustain huge traffic surges without stress.

Our job is not to host unfinished side projects.

Hosting the web's "hello world" applications for zero money is not a sustainable business model. Most of all, we should really ask ourselves: is it really useful to humanity?

Since free tier costs money, who really pays for it? Loyal and paying customers, of course. And that’s just not fair. I prefer to say: our price is the right price. We are not making you pay for a poor marketing idea. If you are not ok with our price, don't worry.

We can always agree on something: just email us at sales@clever-cloud.com.

But the problem about free tier goes even deeper: this poor marketing strategy is lowering the overall customer perception of PaaS. What doesn’t have a price doesn’t have any value, and the idea that PaaS provides no value is a deeply entrenched misconception. This is one of the reasons the PaaS market has taken so long to emerge.

Can Clever Cloud ever be free?

Sure, we help open-source projects, charity, media and other projects by giving them free hosting. If you think your project deserves it, just send me an email: quentin.adam@clever-cloud.com.

Post Scriptum: I’m really happy to see Heroku changing their point of view on this and slowly nerfing their free trial offer. The industry, and the web in general, can only benefit from it.

When interacting with 3rd party json-based APIs from scala, modelling the API's responses with case classes can come in handy. If the JSON exhibits some properties (homogenous lists, for instance), it's easy to create a case class with the same structure. With some deserialization magic it's easier to deal with the API's responses.

So basically is borring to write the case class, and the tool is doing it for you. The target was not to be perfect, but just to allow you quickly generate some case class.

You can test it here : http://json2caseclass.cleverapps.io/

So here is the repo :

Features

json 2 case class can generate

• nested case classes from JSON objects
• lists from JSON arrays
• scala base types from JSON primitives
• Option[T] for optional values

Example

Here is an example with some github issues API data

json from github :

[
  {
    "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World/issues/1347",
    "html_url": "https://github.com/octocat/Hello-World/issues/1347",
    "number": 1347,
    "state": "open",
    "title": "Found a bug",
    "body": "I'm having a problem with this.",
    "user": {
      "login": "octocat",
      "id": 1,
      "avatar_url": "https://github.com/images/error/octocat_happy.gif",
      "gravatar_id": "somehexcode",
      "url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat"
    },
    "labels": [
      {
        "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World/labels/bug",
        "name": "bug",
        "color": "f29513"
      }
    ],
    "assignee": {
      "login": "octocat",
      "id": 1,
      "avatar_url": "https://github.com/images/error/octocat_happy.gif",
      "gravatar_id": "somehexcode",
      "url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat"
    },
    "milestone": {
      "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World/milestones/1",
      "number": 1,
      "state": "open",
      "title": "v1.0",
      "description": "",
      "creator": {
        "login": "octocat",
        "id": 1,
        "avatar_url": "https://github.com/images/error/octocat_happy.gif",
        "gravatar_id": "somehexcode",
        "url": "https://api.github.com/users/octocat"
      },
      "open_issues": 4,
      "closed_issues": 8,
      "created_at": "2011-04-10T20:09:31Z",
      "due_on": null
    },
    "comments": 0,
    "pull_request": {
      "html_url": "https://github.com/octocat/Hello-World/issues/1347",
      "diff_url": "https://github.com/octocat/Hello-World/issues/1347.diff",
      "patch_url": "https://github.com/octocat/Hello-World/issues/1347.patch"
    },
    "closed_at": null,
    "created_at": "2011-04-22T13:33:48Z",
    "updated_at": "2011-04-22T13:33:48Z"
  }
]

generated Scala:

case class User(login:String, id:Double, avatar_url:String, gravatar_id:String, url:String)
case class Labels(url:String, name:String, color:String)
case class Milestone(url:String, number:Double, state:String, title:String, description:String, creator:User, open_issues:Double, closed_issues:Double, created_at:String, due_on:String)
case class Pull_request(html_url:String, diff_url:String, patch_url:String)
case class Issue(url:String, html_url:String, number:Double, state:String, title:String, body:String, user:User, labels:List[Labels], assignee:User, milestone:Milestone, comments:Double, pull_request:Option[Pull_request], closed_at:Option[String], created_at:String, updated_at:String)

I hope you'll enjoy it. Feel free to propose new features and/or to contribute !

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