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This podcast is about workplace innovation through technology, with a special focus on Claris FileMaker and the Claris Community.
For you to be lovey.
Ernest:Hey, Angelo. The cat can join us.
Angelo:She will. She's gonna sit on my keyboard.
Ernest:Well, welcome back to another podcast on Ottomatic, and we've got another episode talking about some of the cool things that's coming out on the platform. So for those of you who are FileMaker developers and interested in FileMaker hosting and FileMaker server and what we're doing in the automatic platform, I think there are some cool things here that we can talk about today. Hi, Angelo.
Angelo:Hey, Ernest. How are you?
Ernest:I'm doing alright. Why don't we get right into it? So I think we've got some interesting things happening on automatic. Right? And and one of the things that we wanna bring out today is automatic essentials.
Ernest:You may wanna share a bit Ottomatic Essentials, is that new? Is that something people have seen before? Like, what's happening in there?
Angelo:Ottomatic Essentials has been around for a limited time right now. It's the next evolution of shared hosting. So back in the early days of FileMaker, FileMaker had shared servers. You could put multiple tenants on there, and and people just just accessed the same server. It was low cost.
Angelo:It was inexpensive, but it did create some problems with compliance and, you know, data security and whatnot. So
Ernest:Wait. Wait. So so before but let me make sure I got this right. I think I understand this. Like, but back in the old days, so to speak, you could literally old days.
Ernest:You could literally put lots of different customers' files and database on one file of the server.
Angelo:Right? It was allowed by the license.
Ernest:Yes. Yeah. And then that stopped around fifteen. Was it '16?
Angelo:FileMaker 15 server rewrote the licensing for that, or Clarus rewrote the licensing for that to to sort of stop that process requiring a single server for each of their customers.
Ernest:But but it was never really a good idea to begin with. Right? Because of security and sort of
Angelo:It was it was it was truly designed for just a small team, just a couple of couple of, you know, couple of files, couple of users, that kind of thing. And just something low cost and and get someone get someone going. A lot of the hosts out there did that because, again, it was an affordable option rather than spending the money on a dedicated infrastructure.
Ernest:Right. But so to be clear, we have never really offered something like that for modern FileMaker systems since I wouldn't Right.
Angelo:I wouldn't recommend that. No.
Ernest:Right. The idea was kinda cool. The idea that you could have a multitenant way of making and deploying a server that people can take advantage of without having to have a whole dedicated VM just for that server for for certain use cases, like even dev machines. Like, how often do we want just to spin up a dev machine and and not have to hog up a whole VM? And sometimes you need that extra juice occasionally, but not all the time.
Ernest:Right?
Angelo:That's right. That's exactly right. That's exactly right.
Ernest:Okay. So, yeah, that's the old days, but this is not what we're talking about. So Automatic Essentials is something different. Yeah.
Angelo:It's something different. It's container based, so built around Docker. What this affords us to do is to grab a a large bare metal server and containerize it so we can get your FileMaker database and FileMaker infrastructure in a container. We offer it in two different flavors. Right?
Angelo:We've got Essentials and Essentials Pro, which is a HTTPS tunneling version. And then we have a f b one version, which is just like any other server. It's still containerized, but you get a dedicated IP v four and v six address that you can connect to through standard FileMaker networking protocol. And there's there's differences in why we did this.
Ernest:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Talk talk about that because we looked at Dockerize hosting instances. I mean, we've we've been looking at it for a long time, but we've elected to mostly use VMs for our production and publicly
Angelo:That's correct.
Ernest:Hosted offerings. Right? You wanna say more about that?
Angelo:Yeah. The reason the reason we didn't really focus on Docker infrastructure originally was because we had compliance to maintain and meet. Docker is great and wonderful, but the way it's designed right now for FileMaker is it has to run-in a privileged mode, and this gives each container a little more access to the host operating system than we would like for a a really compliant production server, which which makes it, you know, better suited for a small team that doesn't have strict compliance requirements or a dev server environment. And that's truly what it was designed for right now.
Ernest:So our Docker instances on automatic today, automatic essentials, in fact, is Docker based, fully compliant, runs its own secure encrypted file system. Storage.
Angelo:That's right. So so we took it a step further. We basically mount a private disk image where customer data is kept. Docker in its traditional sense just shares everything. All of your data normally goes in the same file system, and and it's just folder separated.
Angelo:So we're mounting a logical drive for every customer to secure it even further, and those logical drives are encrypted at rest. So we have protections in place to make it more compliant. Data security is is our number one.
Ernest:Right. And and partly that's because SOC two expectations and requirements compels us to actually do more than just go, YOLO, here's your data. Right?
Angelo:And That's right. That's right. Yeah. So, I mean, there there there are multiple ways to do it, and there's companies out there that that, you know, choose to do it the the normal standard way, which, you know, could be fine for some, but, you know, you're not meeting compliance by doing it that way. So we have to Right.
Angelo:Take it that extra step.
Ernest:Or we are not meeting compliance if we did it another the other way. Right? So that that was
Angelo:That's correct.
Ernest:Two in terms of it's one thing if the customer is is, you know, sort of oblivious to whether or not the security layer is actually good or not. It's another thing when we get audited and go, well, that's not gonna work and that's
Angelo:that's Right.
Ernest:That's been
Angelo:going on. We we we we don't want an auditor to look at look at our infrastructure and our documentation and and say we have we have increased the attack surface for our customers. You know, that's that's just not something we want to have happen. You know, we wanna be good stewards of people's data.
Ernest:So this is this is very cool. So so recap, Automatic Essentials, basically dockerized instances running on really freaking amazing fast big bare metal servers that are available to people through the automatic platform and automatic console. Is provisioning the same as any automatic instance?
Angelo:Provisioning is the same. You fill out our our form and and the request will get processed and the the instance will be provisioned. And I was mentioning before that we've got we've got two different flavors of of Yeah. Automatic essentials. Right?
Angelo:We've got the the standard essentials, which does include licensing for FileMaker Pro, and we'll get into that in a second, and then a bring your own license version of that. Those both require the HTTPS tunneling protocol between FileMaker Server and Pro. And then we have an f b one version which is more suited as a a a standard dev server, for instance. It it has a dedicated I p v four and v six address and allows you to connect via FileMaker networking. Now the reason we did HTTPS tunneling is so we could take advantage of couple of very cool things with Cloudflare's global network infrastructure.
Angelo:Mhmm. We accelerate and secure traffic through their Argo smart routing platform. So this is finding the shortest route between your computer and the server through their private network. So it avoids a lot of network latency and a lot of network issues in between. So I was saying that that, you know, Essentials is great for a small team.
Angelo:This makes it even better because it's accelerating your traffic's traffic. It's securing your traffic. So we're running, protocols on that traffic to make sure that there's no malware. There's nobody listening in between, things like that. So we've got checks and balances in place to make sure you're running as smooth as possible and as secure as possible as well.
Angelo:And one thing this also did is if you are using this Essentials account to do some deployments, it accelerates your auto FMS traffic as well. So you get faster deployments in DevOps.
Ernest:Yeah. It doesn't sound like Essentials is less than the full VM instance. In fact, it may be more in a lot of cases. I mean
Angelo:It's more in a lot of cases, but there's trade offs. With VMs, we can do, you know, more redundancy for for backups. We have different firewall options and different DDoS options. Right. You know, there's a trade off on Essentials where we don't have some of those features, but we make up for it in other features where we take advantage of Cloudflare's accelerated and secured network and infrastructure to make up for the the the differences in firewall and things like that.
Ernest:Yeah. Well, it sounds like Essentials is really like maybe we should have named it automatic happy, you know, because because it's like the the happy path towards a fast machine instance that will do all your FileMaker workloads that has all the benefits of automatic the platform and the console and and all of that. It's it's missing, quote, unquote, missing some of the more advanced features, like, you know, some of the firewalling and some of the the the custom backup options that people want. But good grief. It sounds like from a performance standpoint, that doesn't there's really no difference if not it's it's actually better in some cases if if not most cases for for a lot of standard workloads.
Ernest:Yeah.
Angelo:The the two the two regular Essentials tiers aren't really geared towards a developer, for instance. We do lock down access to the admin console, so there is no admin console access. But but a majority of those functions can be performed from within our cloud console. And this is why Essentials is so great over so, say, shared hosting for instance. Right?
Angelo:It integrates directly with our cloud console. So rather than seeing nothing, you actually see your container listed in our console and you can do file uploads and downloads. You can access our our fourteen days of off-site backups and do restores. You can see your users. You can you can, you know, manage all of the advanced features of AutoFMS like webhooks and MCP servers through this as well.
Angelo:So so we tried to make it again as powerful as possible and give you as many features as possible even if you're you're you're not a developer.
Ernest:Yeah. So one option Essential has that we do not offer on the pro or the standard tier is that you can get an Essentials instance with a small number of users without having to to to do a five user minimum. And you can and that can that's bundled in the pricing itself. Right? So we do per user pricing on Essentials.
Angelo:That's correct. Our base Essentials plan, which is our most popular, bundles the FileMaker licensing in with the hosting. So at a low cost per user, you get both the pro license and the hosting. Again, we're limiting that to five users, but you don't have to contact Claris. You don't have to wait for them to to process your your licensing request.
Angelo:You get immediate access to that licensing through our program and you just you're off and running. It's one stop shop for everything. You run your business and just forget about this end of it. We'll take care of it.
Ernest:Yeah. So let me underscore that. That's really important. So five users or less or fewer, Essentials is absolutely the way to go. Very quick start up.
Ernest:There's you can do one. You can do two. You can do four, whatever, five. But beyond five, we're really we're really saying that should be in the standard or or pro tier at at automatic for dedicated VM. Right?
Angelo:Yeah. With with if it with the Essentials pro plan, you you can bring your own licensing. You can run more than five. It's really geared towards that small work group though. And again with the FB1 version of it, you could put more than five on there.
Angelo:But again, it's really designed for that five or fewer.
Ernest:Right. So every single Essentials instance is an isolated instance for your organization and your team. Like, it's not shared with anybody else. It's not sitting on some kind and, yeah, that's pretty awesome. But so it occurs to me that because of the way we've set we've set this up, that that is great for small teams, and and it's also great for for devs, like, devs who need a single instance or a dedicated dev machine or or two where you're not paying five licenses for a dev server.
Ernest:And, of course, there's always a dev server licenses program from Clarus. But but maybe say a little bit more about what this gets you that that that doesn't get you out of the box.
Angelo:Yeah. The the Clarus dev license, I think, is a developer license for three users, and I've seen some for five as well. But it's just a license that Clarus gets you.
Ernest:Right.
Angelo:We are giving you so if you go with our f b one developer plan, you still would wanna bring that license. We just give you a lower cost to Docker container to get going with that that that that existing license you already have. So there's that option. If you don't have the licensing already and you wanna jump right in and you're good with the tunneling, you know, you can grab our standard essentials plans and and get that one or two users to get your development environment up and running, get your concept up and running. And and, again, it's it's it's low cost.
Angelo:It's easy startup, and you don't have to worry about subscribing for, you know, multiyear for for licensing, through Clarus and and having to to wait and and go through those hurdles. Really takes the friction out of it.
Ernest:Yeah. So so really three different tiers for Essentials. So three different pricing plans for Essentials. One is the
Angelo:Per user. Yep.
Ernest:Per user. That's that's $30 per month per user. With a
Angelo:cap of five. Five cap of five.
Ernest:And then you can also bring your own license, which is the other option, which is then you're paying more per user, slightly more per user, but you can do much larger essential deployments and you you can do your dev licenses, anything that you want to. Right? And that starts at $59.59. Per user BYOL. And then once you can also go up from there.
Ernest:Again, Dockerize containers, and then you're in a bigger Docker instance, deployment instance. Also, bring your own license if you want. Then you can do, you know, direct FM networking and other things that you want, custom domains, but still on the Essentials docker sort of environment.
Angelo:That's correct. That's correct.
Ernest:Cool. Well, there's a lot going on here. So I know there are a few things that we probably should share out. And people always ask, so are plug in supported in
Angelo:Plug ins are plug ins are definitely supported in the containers. Okay. Unlike shared hosting or or or something where you wouldn't want a plugin on the file system because it could present a security risk, this is a dedicated container. So you can run plugins within the server side or web direct side, data API side, however you wanna do it. And, you know, you can use your FileMaker scripting to automatically deploy those those plug ins, and and we can help you with that as well.
Ernest:But you don't get access to admin console FileMaker
Angelo:That's correct.
Ernest:As well.
Angelo:That's
Ernest:because AutoFMS is installed in every instance including Essentials instance, you you still can manage stuff through AutoFMS?
Angelo:100%. You can manage you can manage your FileMaker server through both the cloud console or through AutoFMS.
Ernest:Cool. Yeah. We should probably talk a little bit more about tunneling because I I think that's a sleeper feature. I know you mentioned performance. Is this available in version of the do people need to be on?
Angelo:Yeah. Version 21 or better has tunneling support. And we currently only support the current shipping versions. So right now, it's it's versions, you know, twenty twenty four and twenty twenty five. So twenty one and twenty two are the versions supported with, with Essentials.
Angelo:And the tunneling feature, like you mentioned, was a was a very interesting sleeper function. It was designed to help a couple of unique companies that Clarus was was supporting with some particular features, and I think it's a feature that that people should really take advantage of. I know I've worked with certain companies that have issues opening up ports, you know, 5,003 to the outside world. Everything's gotta go through four four three and have SSLs and whatnot. The tunneling, you know, takes care of that.
Angelo:So it operates on four four three. There is a checkbox that needs to be set in both the server and the client in order for that to work. Once that's enabled on both ends, you will operate over that four four three. Now putting Cloudflare in the mix, Cloudflare handles the SSL certificate so you never have to worry about the SSL certificate again. They auto renew it.
Angelo:They run it on their infrastructure. So your server may so show it's running the the Clarus default certificate, but that tunnel is protected by actual secured certificates hosted within Cloudflare.
Ernest:So if if if people run as Automatic Essentials and and is tunneling required? Was that an option? That's the first question.
Angelo:Tunnel tunneling is required on the Essentials and Essentials Pro plans. It's the f b one where you can use regular FileMaker networking. So we wanna we wanted to to celebrate that feature because it does have some benefits, And those benefits are being able to run it through secure proxies and secure networking and to be able to accelerate that in HTTP traffic
Ernest:Right.
Angelo:Which is huge.
Ernest:Out of the box, you don't have to worry about SSL certificates. There's no install upgrades. I mean, we already manage that, but with Essentials with Tuning, this is running of a Cloudflare into our our networks. It becomes just built in, basically, is what you're saying.
Angelo:That's correct. It's all built in. Now you had mentioned upgrades before, and upgrades is a very cool thing with dockerized systems. We, for compliance reasons, have a weekly cadence to apply security patches. So we do weekly builds of a Docker container, and we apply it automatically to all Docker instances.
Angelo:So you're getting OS security patches every week. You're also getting automatic upgrades as well within that, and that covers our AutoFMS as well as FileMaker server within the the major version that you're in.
Ernest:Yeah. And and thinking about devs for a minute, I think one of the things that's really intriguing about this kind of architecture is that there's actually a really positive side effect of being hosted on a very beefy bare metal server. Right? Because we we have a lot of we have auto FMS and auto deploy that that basically is installed and it takes advantages it takes advantage of that entire bare metal server.
Angelo:That's right. Doc Docker Docker affords every container the ability to expand briefly above its limits. So we guarantee a four core eight gig of RAM minimum to every container, every FileMaker container that's deployed on that server. But you run AutoFMS and you do a deployment and that migration process can sometimes ask for more memory. So you could potentially shoot up quickly to 32 gig of RAM required in order to do a performant migration of data.
Angelo:And Docker allows that to happen. Afterwards, scales it back down automatically and handles that memory release so it's clean. So you get that bursted benefit with with that bare metal server and Docker.
Ernest:So as a dev server where you're running or or a dev environment server, whether it's actual dev or staging or testing, I mean, that could speed up some auto some some auto FMS and auto deploy workloads and and getting those things pushed out quickly and built quickly and so forth.
Angelo:That's right. We've seen almost a a 10 x increase in performance in some cases.
Ernest:Yeah. So interesting. So something to consider if you have large implementations or large FileMaker files where it may take some time for auto to chew across it for deployment purposes. This this would be one way to to kind of get get around that issue. Right?
Angelo:100. 100%.
Ernest:Okay. Well, that's that all sounds extremely intriguing. Anything else I miss, Angelo, in in talking about this?
Angelo:So there there are a couple of caveats to Automatic Essentials as there are for everything. One thing, the Essentials and bring your own license plans, the Essentials, those two plans, do not support is ODBC connectivity. Because we're tunneling, we can't open up port twenty three ninety nine, which you would use to connect in. And and, you know, based on the the usage across our entire infrastructure, it's it's a very small amount of users that that use that. And and, frankly, those people usually require more horsepower in order to to run that.
Angelo:That can actually chew up an enormous amount of memory and disk space very quickly.
Ernest:Got it.
Angelo:So that that feature is is one of those. And, again, the admin console for the Essentials and and BYOL plans, you know, do not include the admin console. That's something that we keep locked down. We keep that configuration safe and secure, but we give you the ability to perform the majority of those features in our cloud console or AutoFMS
Ernest:outside of that. You see, probably if you need ODBC, probably a pro pro instance is your best bet.
Angelo:That's correct.
Ernest:But Yeah. If you don't and you're cool with everything else, then Essentials can be a real awesome starting point for for people.
Angelo:That's right. And right now, we're offering Essentials in eight regions. We've got multiple data centers in The US, LA and San Jose. We've got Chicago and New York as well as Atlanta available. Our friends in the in Europe, we've got Amsterdam and London available.
Angelo:And and then, again, our friends in in Australia, we've got Sydney covered there. So we will geographically locate your Essentials instance wherever necessary. And then our backups are also compliant. Our backups go through custom built Cloudflare s three container. So we're pushing there nightly, not only the the FileMaker databases and container data, but the system configuration as well.
Angelo:So, like, your DB's config and your SSL certs and and all the other stuff to rebuild you on the fly very quickly. So if something does happen, we can restore all parts of that FileMaker server and get you going in one piece without loss of anything.
Ernest:Yeah. That sounds amazing. Well, Angela, I think I think we've covered most of the bases here. So to recap, Automatic Essentials is a containerized Docker specifically based instance that we're offering for following hosting and it's available across many regions eight including Amsterdam in London and Sydney, and also, of course, across The United States. Has all kinds of cool tunneling built in HTTPS features that you don't need to worry about.
Ernest:Really performant, and we like it a lot. Has all the cool things that come out of the box. Like we say we like to say batteries included, which is the automatic cloud console and and all that. It's a little different than our standard pro package. You have a little less control, but all things considered, there's virtually everything that you can do on Probe, can do on Essentials with a few caveats around admin and then some backup some some advanced backups needs and so forth.
Ernest:Right? Mhmm. I think I got it. Did I miss anything?
Angelo:That pretty much covers it. You know, like I said, we we try and do our best and develop products to to help all types of companies out there. And and this is one we wanted to get out for our our devs, for our our small shops, and and anyone who can take advantage of it.
Ernest:It sounds awesome. Thanks, Angela.
Angelo:Thank you, Ernest.