Okay, another question. In AWS I have EBS, which allows me to create volumes, define iops/size for them, mount to desired EC2 machines and take snapshots.
How can I achieve same features in Jelastic? I have option to create "Storage Container" but it belongs only to one environment. How can I backup this volume?
Also, what's the best practice of managing storage devices for things like databases? Use separate storage container?
I have option to create "Storage Container" but it belongs only to one environment.
Yes the Storage Container belongs to 1 environment (either part of one of your other environments, or its own), but you can mount it in 1+ other containers (i.e. inside containers of other environments).
You can basically consider a storage container to be similar to AWS EBS: it can be mounted anywhere you like (multiple times even) in containers within environments in the same region.
How can I backup this volume?
Check your hosting provider's backup policy. In our case we perform backups of all containers for our customers for free. Customers do not need to take additional backups themselves. No need for those extra costs and steps... It might be different at some other Jelastic providers so please check this with your chosen provider(s).
If you wish to make your own backups, you can define a script to do it and set it in cron for example. That script can transfer archives to S3 or anything you wish.
what's the best practice of managing storage devices for things like databases?
Just like with AWS, you may experience performance issues if you use remote storage for database access. Jelastic should generally give you lower latency than EBS, but even so I recommend to keep your database storage local (not via storage containers).
Unlike AWS EC2, you do not have the general risk of local storage disappearing (i.e. your Jelastic containers local storage is not ephemeral; you can safely write data there and expect it to be persistent).
If you need multiple database nodes, it is recommended to use database software level clustering features (master-master or master-slave replication for example) instead of sharing the filesystem.
Remember that any shared filesystem is a shared (single) point of failure. What you gain in application / software convenience you may also lose in reliability / high availability. It's often worth making the extra steps in your application to handle this issue another way, or perhaps consider using lsyncd (there are Jelastic marketplace addons for this) to replicate parts of your filesystem instead of mounting a shared storage container.
