Platform Management
Depending of your needs and the criticality of your web applications, Artifakt offers two types of platform: Starter and Scalable.
We recommend that you take some time before choosing the platform type as it is currently not possible to switch from one type to another within the same environment. It means, if you want to switch from a Starter to a Scalable platform, you will have to create another environment and then destroy the old one.
Starter platforms are best suited for development environments, simple websites or small web projects. They are made up of 1 instance hosting your web application including all the additional services such as MySQL, Redis, etc.
Starter platforms are not scalable and not resilient. Changing Starter platform sizing (vertical scaling only) will lead to downtime. In addition, the instance type is burstable, which means that the performance is not stable over time.
Scalable platforms are the go-to standard for the most critical apps (global availability, requiring high resiliency and efficient scalability). They are made up of at least 2 instances allowing resiliency in case of an outage (failover mechanism) for web applications and additional services.
Additional services are run on separated and dedicated instances that are also resilient (at least 2 nodes).
Using Scalable platforms, you will be able to manually scale horizontally and vertically, while avoiding downtime. You will also be able to define rules to automatically scale horizontally, based on memory or CPU usage.
Scalable platforms are highly available:
Compute – We provide features such as load balancing, auto-scaling and provisioning across different Availability Zones (AZ), which are distinct locations that are engineered to be isolated from failures in other AZs.
Database – We automatically deploy databases with a standby replica in a different AZ.
Storage – We automatically store data across different AZs.
By locating cloud resources in different AZs, we eliminate the chance that a failure, such as a power outage, fire or flood, in one AZ will cause your entire website to fail.
Go to Environment → Settings → Platform to manage your platform sizing. From this page, you can easily define application resources, additional services, server limits (scalable type only) or auto scaling configuration.
This section allows you to scale up or down memory (RAM) and storage, based on your web application's needs. If you experience slowness or timeouts, consider increasing the memory.
Please note that
The application storage is only used for your source code and the Operating System (OS) of the instance.
The application storage is ephemeral (data will be lost if servers are replaced or terminated). Please add a persistent disk to store your media and assets.
The application storage cannot be decreased when an environment is
Online(data protection policy)The application instances (web servers) are not meant to be used as emails servers (Port 25 is disabled by default). Please use third parties or additional services to send your transactional emails.
This section allows you to configure sizing of your additional services such as persistent disk, MySQL, etc. More details about additional services here.
This section lets you configure the number of servers that will support your platform. Depending on the platform type, you will be able to configure the minimum and the maximum number of servers.
The difference between the maximum and minimum number of servers relates to the number of load servers available for your platform (used by auto-scaling). These servers will turn on or off depending on the environment's usage (Scalable platforms only).
Please find below some information about server limits.
Platform type | Minimum number of servers | Maximum number of servers |
Starter | 1 | 1 |
Scalable ( | From 1 to 10 | From 1 to 10 |
Scalable ( | From 2 to 10 | From 2 to 10 |
The auto scaling feature is only available for Scalable platforms.
This feature allows you to define rules (RAM or CPU usage thresholds) that will be used to respond to traffic drops or peaks according to your needs.
For example, for traffic peaks, you can set the CPU usage threshold to 70% for 5 minutes. It means that if the average CPU usage of all servers is above 70% for more than 5 minutes, a new server will be automatically started to process new web requests (if the maximum number of servers defined has not already been reached).
At any time, you can change the platform sizing and configuration. If the environment is Offline, the settings will be saved in Artifakt, in order to be used the next time you start the environment. If the environment is Online, Artifakt will trigger a new version to be approved and will keep an history of all the previous versions.
After saving platform settings, a message will display at the top of the page to notify you that changes need to be applied. You can also see when and by whom these changes have been made.
For security purposes, approving changes is limited to users with Admin role.
By clicking on the link Uncommitted changes need to be reviewed, you can review all changes made on the platform. After reviewing, if the changes are satisfactory you can approve them; otherwise if you realize the changes are incorrect you can reject them which will cancel the platform update.
To help you understand the process, here is how the update of any platform works at Artifakt:
Please note that, after approval, your changes will apply within a few minutes and downtime may occur in order to update the platform.
Each time you update the settings of a platform and approve the changes, we increment the version of that platform by one. For example, at some point, your environment will use version 12 of your platform (because you've changed it 12 times).
We have added a platform version history page accessible from Environment → Settings → Platform → Platform History. It helps you keep track of configuration changes made on your platform and know exactly what has been changed, when and by whom.
