Today, we are very proud and excited to share our latest product release. The new any-app capabilities of the Artifakt platform are here to change the game for our existing and, of course, future users.

There’s a big story behind this release, so bear with us and we’ll give you all the details—our journey, our challenges, and a sneak peek at our future plans. 

Let’s dig in!

What does any-app mean?

Traditionally, Artifakt as a product has been focusing on the PHP ecosystem and big applications like Magento and WordPress. But scaling as a product-first, dev-first platform, we needed to make sure that we offer support for the best technologies out there.

With our latest release, we are now offering developers the option to use their favorite runtimes and applications directly in Artifakt, including NodeJS, Java, and Python.

The journey so far

As mentioned, Artifakt has been traditionally focusing on the PHP ecosystem and used PHP as its core engine. But in order to build and scale these new capabilities, a migration towards a more modern and adaptable technology was a must. 

This is where container technology comes in. We have containerized our application and it is now the main technology that powers our engine. 

When it comes to containerized applications, Docker has been an industry standard for quite some time now. In our case and for the past year or so, however, circumstances mandated that we put a pin on modernizing our platform and focus on the needs of our customers and business growth. 

But we are here now, and we are happy to reach this stage of maturity. 

What’s in for you?

The Docker migration and the new any-app capabilities bring value to managers and decision-makers, as well as developers. From the manager’s point of view, Artifakt now becomes the one place where you can view and manage your fleet of applications. For developers, the value lies in the use of Docker images. 

In the legacy system, every time we needed to add more resources (e.g. servers) to an environment, we had to rebuild and reconfigure the entire app. This process becomes obsolete with Docker.

With the new system, we don’t have to go through the entire process of provisioning the server, building the app, etc. We now build a container image of your application that you can recall at any time in one click in our console.

Note that you don’t need to containerize your application by yourself—Artifakt will take care of it with two new jobs :

• Build & Deploy: create, build, and deploy your application container on the servers
• Deploy: deploy the latest build container image available on the servers

What the future holds

Docker and any-app capabilities are only one step of the journey. We have big plans for Artifakt in the upcoming months. 

Containers are a brilliant technology but it is not our endgame—that would be container orchestration. If Docker is part of the answer to deploy containerized applications, Kubernetes becomes a clear contender for container orchestration. The adoption of Kubernetes will allow us to deploy and manage multiple containers without having to manage servers/instances behind but only resources.

This move to Kubernetes will have two big advantages for users:

• Pricing: from servers/instances consumption-based pricing to resource(RAM, CPU, Bandwidth…) consumption-based.
• Deploy faster: we don’t need to commission a server/instance before deploying.

Kubernetes will provide us with more scalability, adaptability, and speed to be able to deliver a state-of-the-art platform that developers can use for any application they want to build, deploy, and manage. 

Stay tuned for all the big news coming your way in the next few months!

And if we already piqued your interest, schedule a demo to see live how Artifakt can help your developers grow your business.