Clever Cloud’s promise is to deploy applications and services in an instant and maintain them in operational condition. But it also means offering you comprehensive tools to meet the needs of your teams: management interfaces, integrations, domains, backups, logs, metrics, etc.
Provide reliable and sustainable solutions, production ready
Sometimes this involves complementary solutions, such as Azimutt, Keycloak, MailPace or Matomo, available as turnkey services that you can deploy like any other add-on via our API, the Console or Clever Tools, etc.
In this field, the common approach is to let customers manage with a ‘1-click’ deployment of open source tools. Perfect for the demo effect and for having a minimal service to test. But what happens when you want to go further and use it on a day-to-day basis for your teams? What about the lifecycle of the application once deployed, updating it with the assurance of taking advantage of its new functions and the possibilities opened up by the synergies of the hosting platform?
This is how we initially imagined our Marketplace strategy, which we have been implementing more actively in recent years: to continue to build Clever Cloud by looking for solutions for our customers, a way of supporting them while enabling them to benefit from our experience, our automation capacity… and our ecosystem. That’s why we’re developing it with partners.
Our Marketplace is an offering that blends in with our native services, taking advantage of the strengths of our platform, our integrations and a unified payment system, but which is kept up to date by dedicated developers and teams who are experts in these solutions.
Would you like to be one of them? Come and talk to us.
Metabase: business intelligence (BI) brought to your team
In the case of Metabase, we worked with David Sferruzza, a long-time companion of Clever Cloud. David is a multi-entrepreneur (including Hook0, _icilundi and Wattflow), a trainer and a CTO who supports start-ups. When we had the opportunity to work with him on various add-on projects for our Marketplace, we said ‘Banco!’.
So, after a few weeks’ work and an internal testing phase, Metabase in the Cloud is the first service available to all our customers. This open source solution connects to your MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL and other databases! Any user can easily use it to create their own questions, and knowledge of SQL is not necessarily required. This means you can make your data available to all your employees.
They can create graphs and dashboards, as well as reports that you will receive by e-mail or through tools such as Slack, and share these resources with third parties. You can also export this data in different formats, or use Metabase as a graphical interface for a read-only database. The possibilities are endless.
How to use Metabase on Clever Cloud
As with any add-on, it can be created using our API, Console or Clever Tools :
$ clever addon create metabase myMetabase
Add-on created successfully!
ID: addon_xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx
Real ID: metabase_xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx
Name: myMetabase
Your Metabase is starting:
- Access it: https://xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx-metabase.services.clever-cloud.com
- Manage it: https://console.clever-cloud.com/addon_xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxxThe Metabase Java application is now deployed with a PostgreSQL database, so there’s nothing more to do. As soon as everything is ready, the management interface will display a configuration wizard asking you to create the administration account.You’ll then be ready to add your first data sources, create Metabase questions and private and/or shared dashboards.
A service deployed the Clever Cloud way
Naturally, you benefit from the simplicity of Clever Cloud: you can adapt the size and number of instances manually or via our automatic scalability parameters, opt for a larger database via our automatic migration tool, define which version or branch of Metabase you want to deploy, etc.
If you’d like to take advantage of a Metabase Enterprise Edition (EE) licence within our hosted infrastructure in Paris, that’s also possible. Finally, we have facilitated integration with MailPace, which is also available in our Marketplace. It can be linked to the application of your Metabase add-on and will be used automatically to send e-mails.
As we have always advocated an open approach to the Cloud, not locking customers into one supplier, this solution works whether or not the data sources are hosted by Clever Cloud. You can easily import a self-hosted Metabase into our infrastructure, and the reverse is also possible.
This add-on is currently available in beta to all our customers. This means that it is fully functional and can be used on a day-to-day basis without any loss of data or functionality, but that we are currently in the process of improving its experience and the way in which you can deploy and use it. Don’t hesitate to give us your feedback in our GitHub community.
Want to find out more? Feel free to deploy and use the service from our Console. A presentation by David and our chief DevRel Horacio will be held on Tuesday 12 November from 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM on our Twitch channel.