FLEXIANT CONCERTO FAQs

Everything you wanted to know about Flexiant Concerto

What is Flexiant Concerto?

Flexiant Concerto is a multi-tenant hosted platform, which enables DevOps to deploy and operate applications with a unique consistent UI and toolset across multiple public clouds.

Who can benefit from Flexiant Concerto?

DevOps, software developers or anyone who wants to deploy and operate applications independently from a specific cloud provider. DevOps who’re familiar with Chef can also benefit from the ability to automate and deploy their own cookbooks across any of the supported clouds.

What are the main benefits of using Flexiant Concerto?

Flexiant Concerto’s easy to use user interface provides extensive functionality around application lifecycle managements across multiple clouds. Flexiant Concerto’s users benefit from the instant access to hundreds of application blueprints and the ability to consistently deploy and operate these across different cloud providers, to achieve the best cost vs. performance ratio.

Is Flexiant Concerto a hosted solution or is it deployed on site?

Flexiant Concerto is a platform hosted and operated by Flexiant.

How much does Flexiant Concerto cost?

Flexiant Concerto’s disruptive pricing model is based on a few simple plans. Irrespectively of the location, size or specific characteristics of your servers, Flexiant Concerto will charge you a very simple monthly fee, that will just limit the number of concurrent servers that can be managed. On top of it, any other specific functionality of Flexiant Concerto, like DNS or load balancing services, is free of charge. If you simply want to try Flexiant Concerto, we also offer a free-for-life plan that will entitle you to manage your applications across a maximum of 3 servers. Please note that you’ll still receive bills from your selected cloud providers directly, as Flexiant Concerto is not responsible for those.

How do I get started with Flexiant Concerto?

Choose your plan, sign up here and follow the quick start tutorial that will take you through the main functionality of the platform. You can also watch this video that illustrates exactly that.

What if I run into problems? Do you provide support?

We sure do. Flexiant Concerto is supported by a dedicated support team that will answer your questions as soon as possible. You can also check out the Knowledge Base that they maintain or just open a case by writing to support@concerto.io.

Features

What are the main features of Flexiant Concerto?

Flexiant Concerto capabilities include many features and functions that can be deployed across multiple clouds and consumed as-a-service. With the goal of guaranteeing consistency independently of the chosen cloud providers, Flexiant Concerto’s features are abstracted from the infrastructure layer. In fact, Flexiant Concerto provides a comprehensive set of application-focused tools, from load balancing and application performance-based auto-scaling to DNS management and monitoring. One of the most interesting capabilities lies in the extensive use of Chef configuration management for application blueprinting within Flexiant Concerto. This enables application blueprints to be deployable on multiple clouds, without relying too heavily on provider-specific OS images.

Which public clouds does Flexiant Concerto work with?

Flexiant Concerto works with all of the major public cloud providers including:

  • AWS
  • Google Compute Engine
  • Microsoft Azure
  • Rackspace
  • Digital Ocean
  • Joyent
  • Softlayer
  • Acens

If there is a public cloud provider you would like to integrate with that isn’t in the list above, please contact us and we can look at integrating with a specific driver.

How does Flexiant Concerto fit with Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator?

Of course, Flexiant Concerto supports Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator as one of the available infrastructure back-ends. Any service provider who already has stood up Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator in its data centers can be eligible to be a cloud infrastructure provider included in the Flexiant Concerto technology platform.

How does Flexiant Concerto’s provide application consistency and portability?

Flexiant Concerto provides an extensive library made of hundreds of application blueprints. These are delivered by Chef recipes that will download, install, build and configure applications, by executing a repeatable set of instructions. Cloud providers just need to provide base OS images (e.g. Ubuntu 14.04 or Windows Server 2012R2) while the application is taken care by Flexiant Concerto, at the same way and with the same result across all supported cloud providers.

I have my own Chef cookbooks and I want to deploy them easily on AWS and GCE, can I do it with Flexiant Concerto?

Yes. The engine behind Flexiant Concerto application blueprinting is indeed Chef. The UI will also let you import your own cookbooks and add them to the extensive library of applications already present in the platform. Afterwards, you’ll be able to deploy them on single servers or server arrays across any of the supported clouds. You’ll also be able to operate the resulting applications thanks to the Flexiant Concerto integrated as-a-service toolset.

How does Flexiant Concerto’s DNS geo-localization and load balancing work?

Flexiant Concerto provides an integrated DNS service. This allows you to automatically register and publish your virtual servers’ IP addresses into the DNS and make sure your web applications are served from the location with the least latency possible. Configuring more than one virtual server with the same DNS record will make Flexiant Concerto round-robin over the set of active servers nearest to the end user in order to respond.

Does Flexiant Concerto also include network load balancing?

Yes. Flexiant Concerto provides an integrated multi-tenant network load balancer, which Flexiant Concerto will use to automatically distribute workload across a pool of servers (server array). Load balancers can also be configured manually. Flexiant Concerto load balancers also supports SSL termination, thereby offloading the heavy lifting of handling encryption from your application server.

Do you extend your functionality by integrating with external partners?

Yes. Extending functionality via partners is a key goal of Flexiant to allow us to focus on our core value, while providing our customer with a best-of-breed eco-system of applications and technologies.

As of today, Flexiant Concerto integrates with the following:

Use case / Functionality Partner
Application performance monitoring New Relic

Can I extend the functionality of my Flexiant Concerto platform?

Absolutely. Flexiant Concerto is built with an open API to customise the platform as much as you want.