Meteor finally launches Galaxy, a web service for easily running apps on AWS

Meteor Development Group, the startup behind the Meteor JavaScript framework, is finally ready to take in revenue. Today, it’s launching the Galaxy service for easily running and hosting Meteor-based applications on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud.

The tool will be able to run “coordinated version updates” to deploy new versions of apps seamlessly.

“In a WebSocket or connected-client app, you have to do it in a sophisticated way to preserve session and the connection between the client and the cloud,” Matt DeBergalis, a cofounder of Meteor Development Group and one of the creators of the Meteor framework, told VentureBeat in an interview. “Otherwise, you see a big interruption in what they’re doing or how the app works.”

That in itself should be appealing. But Galaxy will also feature “connected client management” to show admins which end user devices are using apps and even the individual containers in AWS. And, of course, admins don’t need to worry themselves over the management of the underlying cloud infrastructure to accommodate spikes or drops in usage. One click inside the Galaxy service adds more compute power for an app, DeBergalis said. His team is looking into more automated autoscaling capability, he said.

The service should appeal to the Meteor faithful, those developers who have been attracted to the concept of writing both server and client code for web and mobile apps in JavaScript. Web apps built with Meteor can update with fresh data in real time, without requiring end users to hit the refresh button. And the Meteor community is growing. Meteor is now one of the top 10 most starred projects on GitHub, ahead of the Ruby on Rails web application framework.

Up until now, of course, it’s been up to Meteor developers to deploy their apps on their own.

Meteor Development Group has talked publicly about Meteor since 2012, so today’s launch is a long time coming. “We have had people banging on the door for a long time,” DeBergalis said. For the past month the startup has been running a Galaxy early-access program for more than a dozen customers. Now it’s finally opening up to everyone.

By default, Galaxy runs apps on AWS, but DeBergalis said the startup would like to help companies run Galaxy in pretty much any environment. That could mean providing software customers could buy and maintain for themselves on their existing AWS infrastructure, or on other clouds, or perhaps even in on-premises data centers.

The San Francisco-based startup was founded in 2011 and took on a $20 million round earlier this year. More than 30 people work there now. “We’re doing a lot more than ever,” DeBergalis said.

Galaxy starts at $495 per month when companies pay annually. A Meteor blog post has more detail on Galaxy.