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 want 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 have their own Mendix Cloud through Mendix Cloud Dedicated, a single-tenant instance of the public Mendix Cloud that runs only that organization's applications.

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

Due to the limitations of a Free App, it enters sleep mode after about an hour of inactivity. If you access the app during this time, it displays the following message:

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

To prevent your Free App going into sleep mode, upgrade to a licensed app running on a node in Mendix Cloud. For more information, see Licensing Mendix Cloud Apps.

Deleting Free Apps

This section outlines the different ways Free Apps can be deleted from the Mendix Platform.

Manually Deleting Free Apps

As a Technical Contact you can manually delete a Free App after publishing it from Studio Pro by following these steps:

1. From Apps, go to the Environments page of your app.
2. Click More Options ( ) on the Sandbox environment.
3. Click Delete.

Deleting a Free App deletes the running app, its database, files, and backups. However, the project on the Mendix Platform and its repository on the Team Server remain active and accessible.

Automatic Archiving of Free Apps

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 on the Mendix Platform and repository on the Team Server 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

Automatic Deletion of Unused Projects

If a project has never seen any activity since it was created, it is kept on the Team Server for a maximum of one year. After this, the project on the Mendix Platform, its repository on the Team Server, and any Mendix Cloud resources associated with the project will be permanently deleted.

The system uses the following criteria when determining if an app is unused:

• Free App (i.e. unlicensed)
• Deployed to the Public Mendix Cloud
• Unpinned
• A project team with only 1 team member
• The app was created more than a year ago
• No commits since the app was created

Once a project is marked for deletion, the system applies a grace period of 14 calendar days before it is permanently deleted.

You can prevent this clean up by performing one of the following actions:

• Make changes and commit them to the Team Server
• Pin your app
• Invite someone to collaborate with you on your app

Pinning a project that has been marked for deletion unmarks it immediately. Changes to the other criteria do not affect the mark-for-deletion immediately, but are verified before the actual deletion.

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 to call them.

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.

If you have a Standard, Premium, or Premium Plus plan, you can redeem virtual credits known as cloud tokens 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 per query compared with apps deployed using a Standard plan. For a well-designed app, this difference is not noticeable to end-users.

Application Data Replication

With a premium plan, you can replicate application data in Mendix Cloud to another region for security and disaster recovery purposes. For more information, see the Application Data Replication section in Security Settings in Control Center.

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 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 revert your app to run 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 Mendix on Kubernetes

If you want to deploy your Mendix apps to other environments, you can add these to your Mendix plan. For example, you can deploy to SAP BTP or your own cloud using Mendix on Kubernetes.

Read More

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