Many organizations historically struggled with assessing needs related to server architecture and scalability concerning their website or web properties. As so many variables went into this calculation, making confident projections of current and long-term needs was fraught with oversights and unexpected circumstances that commonly exceeded configured server performance and available resources.
With the advent of cloud hosting and various auto-scaling options, this issue was theoretically a thing of the past. Additional server resources could be dynamically added to the hosting environment, providing greater performance, and increased storage and memory, based on real-time website demand requirements resulting from peaks in site traffic, site activity, processing requests, or a combination of these and any other possible variables.
As many Kentico clients began to deploy their sites or migrate their sites into auto-scaling hosting environments, we identified that there was now a disconnect between our traditional server-based licensing model and the more modern on-demand hosting services available to our clients. Kentico licensing became the bottle-neck for a client’s ability to fully take advantage of on-demand hosting services and their ability to dynamically accommodate for planned or unplanned spikes in website demand and performance requirements. Traditional Kentico licensing would only allow a client-hosting environment to scale to the fixed number of licensed servers, meaning that a client would need to either license an appropriate number of servers to accommodate their peak demand requirements (unnecessarily costly) or accept the likely potential for website outage or availability issues, where the available server resources could not keep up with the website demands (unrealistic).
Recognizing that this is a significant issue for many of our clients, Kentico devised a more modern licensing model that will better accommodate the dynamic and flexible server scaling options currently provided through most cloud-hosting solutions. This licensing model will be similar in nature to our traditional licensing, in that, licensing will be determined by the license edition: EMS, Ultimate, or Base (e.g., functionality requirements) and the number of managed main domain production websites. The difference will be that the licensing will provide greater flexibility in the licensed server count and won’t limit the website(s) from running across a ‘scaled-out’ environment, regardless of the number of dynamically added servers or instances needed to address the website demand requirements.
The new Kentico Scalable License model will be available in (three) options or tiers:
- Auto-Scalable Licensing
- Planned-Scalable Licensing
- Emergency- Scalable Licensing
and depending on the frequency of anticipated need or the uncertainty of when the need(s) may arise, a client can choose the scalable-license option that best suits their situation or SLA requirements.
Is your organization similarly planning to migrate your site(s) to a cloud-hosting option or have you have already completed this type of migration?
Please contact your Kentico sales representative (sales@kentico.com) to discuss options to leverage one of our more flexible licensing options that will allow your company the ability to take full advantage of the auto-scaling benefits afforded by cloud hosting and on-demand scalability.