Appwrite Cloud Is Now in Private Beta
Posted by Christy Jacob, Engineering Lead 
We’re excited to share a major milestone in the development of the Appwrite Cloud. Today, Cloud enters the private beta stage. In the next few weeks, we will gradually invite all members who have signed up for early Cloud access to start onboarding, building, and innovating on Cloud.
We know how excited you all were for this release, and we can’t wait to get your feedback and learn about your experience with Cloud and work to constantly make it better.
TL;DR Sign up at https://appwrite.io/cloud
Why Appwrite Cloud?
At Appwrite, we are committed to the open-source community and believe that developers should have access to powerful tools and services that are intuitive, developer-centric and affordable. With Appwrite Cloud, we are extending our commitment to provide developers with the best possible experience by offering a fully managed backend solution that simplifies infrastructure management and helps them focus on what they do best - building great applications!
Appwrite Cloud comes with a host of features & benefits that are guaranteed to speed up your development workflow even further!
Fully Managed Backend Infrastructure
While self-hosting can be great, maintaining your own infrastructure is not everyone’s cup of tea. Lots of things need to be accounted for when you decide to create your own infrastructure. Starting from the configuration of the machines to the security and protection of your infrastructure from bad actors, the list is endless. Appwrite Cloud takes care of cumbersome infrastructure tasks, so you can focus on building applications without being weighed down by server maintenance and updates.
Auto Scaling
With Appwrite Cloud, developers can easily scale their applications as traffic grows without the need for any manual intervention. Appwrite Cloud was designed to scale horizontally, which means that it automatically adds more computing and storage when the load increases, thereby allowing developers to handle sudden traffic spikes without compromising application performance.
Built-in Security
Appwrite Cloud comes bundled with advanced security features like DDoS protection, WAF rules, layers of firewall, SSL, encryption, rate and abuse limits, and more. These features help ensure data integrity, security, protection against malicious attacks, and most importantly, give developers peace of mind.
Seamless Integration
Appwrite Cloud integrates with all your favorite programming languages and frameworks, allowing developers to build applications in the language of their choice. The presence of SDKs in addition to cloud function runtimes in your favorite language ensure a cohesive experience when building applications on the Appwrite Cloud.
Everything else from Appwrite Open Source!
Appwrite Cloud is an extension of the open source version of Appwrite, the one we all truly love and use! Appwrite Cloud comes with everything you would expect from the open-source version, just simplified and with reduced friction. All the standard Appwrite features like authentication, databases, storage, functions, real-time APIs will remain an integral part of the cloud.
What is Appwrite Cloud Beta?
Cloud Beta, simply put, is a pilot version of the Appwrite Cloud unveiled to a smaller subset of the developer community. During this time, our main goal is to ensure we iron out any major issues that can compromise a great developer experience as well as to test the reliability and performance of the platform.
During the Private Beta, we’ll be working closely with developers and other members of the Appwrite community to improve the platform and add new features based on their feedback. During this phase, Appwrite Cloud will be completely free to use, and we plan to announce our pricing in a couple of months. More on that in the next section.
You can sign up for early access at https://appwrite.io/cloud
What’s Next?
We have a lot of things planned in the upcoming months while we await Cloud to become publicly available, and we’d love to share some highlights with you.
Cloud Interviews & Surveys
We’re conducting a series of interviews & surveys with participants of the Private Beta to get more insights into their requirements. During these interviews, we focus on understanding their background, their reasons for using a backend server like Appwrite, their use cases, their experience so far, along with their expectations and shortcomings of the platform. These interviews have provided key insights that have prompted us to steer in the right direction.
If you’re part of the Beta and would like to participate in these interviews, please reach out to me on our community Discord or my email, and we’d be glad to set up a call.
Pricing
Our goal is to make Appwrite Cloud affordable and accessible to all developers. We’re working together with developers in the Appwrite community to create a transparent and predictable pricing model. We’re taking insights from the cloud interviews as well as pricing of similar products as a baseline to work towards a fair model. Rest assured, there will be a generous free tier for all the hobby projects you’ve been wanting to create!
Self Hosted Version
A lot of us may have questions about the open source version of Appwrite and its future. We can proudly say, we will continue to stand among the handful of companies that have been open-source first. Our vibrant community is a testament that, for the longest time, we have prioritized the open source version, and we will continue to do so. In fact, all major features will roll out to the open source version even before they hit the cloud! Appwrite will forever remain open source!
Multi-Region Support
During the Beta, we’re operating with Frankfurt as our primary region. This is a careful decision to ensure we are geographically centrally located. As we get closer to general availability, we will focus on 3 more regions, namely San Francisco, New York, and Singapore with more regions to follow.
Compliance
Compliances are frameworks that help organizations ensure they are meeting certain standards and requirements in regard to data security and privacy. For most SaaS/BaaS companies, SOC 2, HIPAA & GDPR are the essential ones. These certifications help companies demonstrate to their customers and stakeholders they are taking data security and privacy seriously, and are committed to protecting their sensitive information.
These usually involve a lot of paperwork, documentation, and administrative processes. We’re in the process of ensuring we meet the highest standards for data security and privacy.
Support for More Function Runtimes
While in beta, Appwrite Cloud supports five serverless runtimes, namely, Node, Python, PHP, Ruby, and Dart. As we approach general availability, we will continue to add support for our entire suite of runtimes based on the requests and requirements of the beta participants.
Coming up
We’ve set multiple goals and key performance indicators to help us determine the success of this important stage before making the Appwrite Cloud generally available. Those indicators include the feedback and insights we get from beta participants, consumption metrics, and our infrastructure resilience during this time. Once those are achieved, our goal is to make the beta publicly available before officially announcing the release of the Cloud platform and reaching general availability.
As always, thank you to the Appwrite community for your support. This milestone would have never been possible without your support and contribution. You’re all amazing, and we’ll continue working hard to give you the development platform you all deserve.
