Cloud on Cloud: Rollbase moves to Amazon S3 for Storage

As any SaaS vendor will attest, cost of application revenue (CoR) is a critical metric that should be constantly monitored and trimmed to maximize margins as operations scale. Cloud computing services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), for which costs are precisely aligned with resources used and no more, can have a dramatic impact on overall CoR.

As of this week we've started an ongoing trimming process that will not only help reduce our CoR, but will have the effect of driving up the amount of resources available to Rollbase customers per unit cost. The first step we've taken in this direction is to move all file storage to Amazon's S3 service. This means that any file and image data stored in file fields, image fields, templates, shared images, etc, throughout your Rollbase account will actually be securely stored on Amazon's infrastructure.

S3 is now the default storage option for all new Rollbase accounts and we are quite comfortable making this move given that Amazon is providing a Service Level Agreement (SLA) guaranteeing 99.9% performance. Stay tuned for an update to the Rollbase PaaS plans allowing for much greater amounts of storage per dollar.

For customers who wish to use Rollbase-native storage rather than Amazon S3 we do have a simple mechanism to enable this for you. Whether for compliance reasons or otherwise, please contact us if you would prefer that your file and image data not be hosted on S3 and we will make the appropriate adjustment to your account (this is quite literally a simple checkbox on our end).