Writer: Lynn Cadet
Editor: Lillian Castro
Reviewer: Cristian Lopez
TL; DR: A developer’s life is full of tasks, with some more menial than others. Elestio helps dev teams offload manual and time-consuming DevOps duties with its fully managed platform. The platform manages and deploys open-source software, so developers can start using software in under five minutes and focus on high-value tasks. We spoke with Joseph Benguira, CTO and Founder of Elestio, about the platform, its managed services, CI/CD system, and what’s next for the company.
Some people are just born to be entrepreneurs. And Joseph Benguira, Chief Technology Officer and Founder of Elestio, just happens to be one of them.
Before he created Elestio, Joseph founded two other startups while residing in Silicon Valley and Dublin, Ireland. AppDrag, the more popular one of the two, saw massive growth and success. The cloud-hosted serverless environment enables users to accelerate website and application development.
AppDrag helped build tens of thousands of websites and applications. But Joseph found that he was receiving customer requests for open-source software support.
“We started by saying, let’s find a solution for you. So we would deploy different open-source software and various tools based on their requirements. At some point, we reached about 100 deployed VMs we were managing for those customers manually. And it became impossible to manage at that scale,” said Joseph.
This challenge essentially led to the birth of Elestio. In 2020, Joseph and his team decided to create a tech solution that would automate manual DevOps tasks for open-source development. They developed a system with a pipeline that could automatically detect new versions, verify vulnerabilities, and complete weekly updates and backups.
Today, Elestio is a fully managed DevOps platform that supports 350+ open-source solutions, powers CI/CD pipelines, and deploys on any cloud or on-premises. Keep reading to learn more about the platform and its benefits.
Elestio Takes Care of Everything DevOps
Elestio eliminates the hassle of management for dev teams by taking it on for them. Its fully managed services support hundreds of open-source software, including WordPress, LobeChat and Docker.
Unlike other cloud hosting solutions, Elestio’s assistance goes beyond fast deployment.
“When you deploy software, with most other providers it is partially configured. In most cases, you still have to do the SSL and DNS configuration and change some parameters. With the Elestio experience, we do all of that,” said Joseph.
Here are some of the tasks that the Elestio team handles for its customers:
- Automated backups
- Software and OS updates
- Live monitoring
- Encryption for all connections with TLS
- Installation and configuration
Developers are needing to build faster than ever. And Elestio allows them to do so with this platform. It takes low-value tasks off their plates so dev teams can focus on building their applications. Elestio also ensures the performance and security of software with automated updates.
“Our team ensures that all the supported software in the catalog has the correct security and that we also take care of all the upgrades over time,” said Joseph.
Elestio designed and built its platform to handle everything a developer would need — something they couldn’t find anywhere else. This is why Elestio doesn’t use any external tools.
“The perfect process we wanted was to manage the building and the monitoring of source code at the beginning until the deployment and management of everything at the end. So the platform couldn’t be a collection of assembled tools. We had to develop this from scratch and that’s exactly what we did,” said Joseph.
Open-Source Through and Through
Elestio is open-source through and through. It not only manages open-source software for its users but also partners with providers and the community.
“We are an open-source company. We use open-source software, publish open-source projects, and republish most of what we are doing. We also participate in open-source projects,” said Joseph.
Joseph told us that Elestio makes commits, including doing bug fixes for its partners’ open-source software, and republishes them in the upstream. By sharing revenue with open-source publishers, Elestio also makes a vital contribution to the sustainability and growth of the community.
A Simpler and More Affordable CI/CD System
The second primary product Elestio offers is a fully managed CI/CD system. All you have to do is connect to GitHub or GitLab and select a specific repository in your account. Then, Elestio takes it from there.
“We detect, based on your repo, what is the stack and your env template. And then we automatically do the reverse proxy configuration for it. So in a few clicks, your CI/CD pipeline is working, your app is deployed and the URL is ready,” said Joseph.
Joseph told us the CI/CD pipeline is quite popular among Elestio users. He said the product amounts to 30% of the company’s sales and he credits that success to its ease of use and affordability.
“It’s a lot simpler than other systems that are on the market, and it’s not expensive. You can get a CI/CD VM where you can deploy multiple CI/CD pipelines starting at $15 per month. You’ll get two CPUs, 4 GB of RAM, and 40 GB of disk with persistence,” said Joseph.
Users can also scale with ease. With a single VM, you can deploy 10 pipelines. If you run out of resources with one host, Elestio makes it easy for you to create a second pipeline and migrate the other pipelines (with their configurations) to your other hosted VM in about three minutes.
Joseph told us that Elestio’s two products can also work in tandem. Businesses can leverage them both for more flexibility, depending on what they need at the time.
“For instance, if you want to add a chat on your website, you can use a lot of different tools, including let’s say WordPress that you want to deploy as well. The chat can be deployed either as a dedicated service or as a CI/CD pipeline on a single VM where you can concentrate on multiple services,” said Joseph.
Strong Social Media Presence and Community
Thousands of companies trust Elestio to deploy and manage their open-source software. As a matter of fact, Elestio isn’t only popular among its customers. The company boasts more than 12,000 subscribers on its YouTube channel and has an active Discord community.
“We publish a video review of an open-source software weekly. So a lot of time, we get suggestions and requests for new software from YouTube or our Discord channel. And on average, we add ten new software every month to the catalog,” said Joseph.
Elestio has added 15 AI-based software solutions to its platform. Those additions include Ollama for LLM generation and LobeChat for chatbot frameworks.
The Road Map Ahead…
Joseph is also excited about Elestio’s upcoming launch, which he shared exclusively with HostingAdvice. The release will feature a database cluster system that can be deployed in 135 locations.
“You can also have a cluster based on multiple cloud providers. So you can have a master in, let’s say, AWS and replicas in multiple other cloud providers, which is quite nice,” said Joseph.
Elestio will be launching the cluster on eight different databases, including MySQL, Redis, and ClickHouse. The Elestio team put a lot of effort into creating the cluster and looks forward to releasing it to its audience.
“I can’t wait for it to be ready and in production. Right now, it’s been in testing mode for seven weeks. And we still have some things to fix before we go live. But I’m so excited about it, frankly. Developers are going to love it,” said Joseph.
