Mendix Cloud

Introduction

Mendix Cloud is the default deployment option for Mendix applications. It is a public cloud service for Mendix applications, with infrastructure built and maintained by Mendix and built on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Mendix Cloud is optimized to run Mendix applications, is available in multiple regions around the globe, and comes with high availability options.

There are several options for deployment with Mendix Cloud:

• Mendix Free – If you are new to the Mendix community and would like to create, deploy, and share your own app, you can do so for free using Mendix’s limited Free App environment. Note that Free Apps do not support complex or large applications, only run for a couple of hours before shutting down, cannot be scaled, and provide limited operational information.
• Mendix Cloud with licensed nodes – With a license, you can take advantage of Mendix Cloud’s full features, including deep insights, alerting, high availability, and backups.
• Mendix Cloud Dedicated – Organizations can also have their own Mendix Cloud. Mendix Cloud Dedicated is a single-tenant instance of the public Mendix Cloud, running the apps of only one organization.

Free App

Free Apps make it possible to start creating and deploying apps with Mendix for free. Free Apps have several limitations compared to licensed apps. The main limitations are summarized in the table below:

Sleep Mode

As noted in the table above, a Free App goes into sleep mode after about an hour of inactivity. If you access the app while it is inactive, it displays the following message:

If, after a couple of minutes, your app does not wake up, contact Mendix Support.

You can upgrade a Free App to a licensed app running on a node in Mendix Cloud. For more information, see Licensing Mendix Cloud Apps.

Free Apps Archiving

If a Free App has been in sleep mode for three months or longer, it may be archived. For Free Apps that are going to be archived, the Technical Contact is informed two weeks beforehand. Upon archiving, the project and model are retained and will remain active and accessible, but the running app, database, files, and backups for the Free App are deleted.

There are two ways to prevent your Free App from being archived:

• Visit the Free App
• Deploy a new version of your app to your Free App environment

Licensed App

A licensed app runs on a node with at least two environments: production and acceptance. If required, you can also add a test environment or use Flexible Environments. Your licensed app is linked to a node and can be deployed to any of these environments. It is possible to specify different resource packs for each of these environments, but Mendix recommends that you make your production and acceptance environments the same size.

Flexible Environments

If the standard environments that you get with a licensed app do not meet your requirements, you can request a Mendix Cloud node with Flexible Environments. With Flexible Environments, you can specify how many environments you want in your node. You can also decide what they should be called.

Database

Apps deployed to Mendix Cloud are configured to use a PostgreSQL database. It is not possible to configure your app to use an alternative database if it is deployed to Mendix Cloud.

If you need to use a different database, consider deploying your app to a different platform. For more information, see Deploying Apps.

URLs and Ports

Apps that run on Mendix Cloud are automatically assigned their own URLs. The format of the URL depends on the license and environment type, and can be one of the following:

For licensed apps, you can customize a URL by adding custom domains.

Mendix apps cannot use custom ports. They communicate on the standard HTTP and HTTPS ports (80 and 443); connections to HTTP (80) are redirected to HTTPS (443).

Number of End-Users for Licensed Apps

The number of end-users supported for your licensed app depends on your pricing plan. End-users of your app are classified as either internal or external. You need to report this for licensing purposes, using either the USAGE_METRICS_EMAIL_FIELDS custom variable (if you are using email domains to distinguish between end-users) or by populating the user type for each end-user of your app. Only end-users whose Mendix accounts are marked as Active are counted towards the number of end-users of the app.

Supported Mendix Versions

Mendix Cloud supports deploying and running all supported major versions of Mendix. This includes major versions that are supported via the Extended Support product. It is not possible to deploy unsupported versions to Mendix Cloud.

Mendix Pricing Plans

Mendix licenses are sold as part of plans. Plans consist of the following items:

• A subscription to a plan
• A cloud resource pack, which specifies the resources available to your app environment
• Additional resources, such as fallback environments

Plans

The following plans are available:

• Free
• Basic
• Standard
• Premium
• Premium Plus

For more information, see Pricing.

Cloud Resource Packs

Mendix environments are sized by reference to cloud resource packs. These resources are used for application runtime as well as anything else required to run your application, such as agents for any third-party integrations that you have added. The table below shows the current cloud resource packs for Standard, Premium, and Premium Plus plans. Resources for the Basic plan are fixed as described in Mendix Basic Package.

If you have a Standard, Premium, or Premium Plus plan, you can redeem virtual credits known as cloud credits to purchase cloud resource packs on the Mendix Platform. For more information about how this works, see Entitlements.

The technical details for the cloud resource packs are listed below.

The legacy cloud resource packs listed below are still being used but are not available to new customers.

Additional Resources

For Premium customers using a Premium resource pack, there are additional features available for apps deployed to Mendix Cloud. There are also additional ways to deploy Mendix apps.

High Availability and Fallback

Premium plans come with High Availability and Fallback out of the box. This ensures that copies of your app are spread across multiple availability zones (AZs). If there is a problem with a specific AZ, copies of your app running on other AZs remain available.

With a Premium plan, your app can be horizontally scaled. To fully benefit from high availability, your app needs at least two instances so that it is running in more than one AZ. This is important for critical production apps, which cannot afford to have downtime during an AZ outage in the AWS data center.

Fallback ensures that the data in your database is automatically copied to a database in a second AZ. This ensures that all your data is still available to your app if there is an issue with the primary availability zone and app instances have to be started in the second AZ.

The connections between AZs are low latency. However, the implementation of these features means that your monitoring may indicate that apps deployed to Mendix Cloud under a Premium plan suffer an additional latency of a few milliseconds compared with apps deployed using a Standard plan. For a well-designed app, this difference is not noticeable to end-users.

Regional Fallback

You can also purchase a Premium Plus plan, which provides all the features of the Premium plan, with the addition of Regional Fallback.

With Regional Fallback, a copy of your database and FileDocuments is maintained in a completely separate region. For example, if your app normally runs in us-east-1, a copy of your data is made in us-west-2. If all the AZs in the primary region become unavailable, you can then choose to run your app temporarily in the secondary region with the data that has been copied to that region. Once the primary region is back online, you can then revert your app to running in the primary region.

Because this is designed for a catastrophic regional failure, there are some limitations to your normal operations. For example, you cannot deploy a new version of the app while it is running in the secondary region. The decision to switch to the secondary region is completely under your control.

On-Premises and Private Cloud

If you want to deploy your Mendix apps to other environments, you can add these to your Mendix plan. For example, you can choose to deploy to SAP BTP. You can also choose to deploy to your own cloud using Mendix for Private Cloud.

Read More

• Deploying an App to Mendix Cloud
• Custom Domains
• Licensing Mendix Cloud Apps
• App Roles