Gandi Flex – End of Life

Gandi Flex, launched in 2013 and developed by Gandi, enables our clients to update their servers according to a schedule that they make themselves, to add or remove CPU cores and RAM on the fly. Contrary to our initial expectations, only a minority of our users adopted it, and we have therefore decided to shut it down as part of our ongoing hosting projects for 2017.

In fact, since the creation of Gandi Flex almost 5 years ago, vertical scaling has given away to horizontal scaling as the preferred method to live scale most applications. Users prefer to add or remove servers from their infrastructure to cope with demand fluctuation, instead of adding or removing power to a single server. Going forward, it therefore makes more sense to focus our efforts on the Web Accelerator, a load-balancing and caching service that we built in-house and that is better adapted to these workflows.

Combined with the other features of our platform, it is very easy to clone or delete existing servers and add or remove them to Web Accelerators to scale an infrastructure up and down. They can even be securily connected to the same databases over a virtual private network, all while sustaining no downtime.

In addition, a number of open source and proprietary tools have taken shape that offer the same functionnality as Gandi Flex. It is fairly easy to use our API and CLI, or libraries such as libCloud in combination with these tools, to scale an infrastructure vertically and/or horizontally according to a predetermined schedule or in response to load events.

We will therefore be focusing our efforts on improving other aspects of our platform in 2017 and Gandi Flex won’t be available as they are launched. On the one hand, it won’t be available for servers running in the new datacenters and, on the other hand, it won’t be available on our new website, currently in beta. Then, beginning on April 1st, 2017, our current users won’t be able to create new probes in Gandi Flex anymore and the service will be definitively stopped on September 1st, 2017, at which time all scheduled tasks will be deleted. This time frame will leave ample time for current users to find an alternative solution.

We will regularly email all our customers currently using the service to remind them of these dates. Please don’t hesitate to contact our Customer Care team should you have any questions about the end of life of Gandi Flex.