Infrastructure clarifications

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Hi everyone, I’m a noob to Mendix so my apologies if I missed something in the public documentation. We just decided to purchase Mendix and need some clarification on some infrastructure items in order to budget for our AWS resource costs. We are currently leaning to running our apps in the Mendix Cloud so these questions/answers might involve Cloud Foundry. I’m quite familiar with Docker but not Cloud Foundry. I looked through the publically available documentation and couldn’t find the answers to the following. Thank you for your time. Is a Mendix environment (prod, acceptance, dev, etc) implemented as a single VM/containers or a set of VMs/containers?  Does a Mendix environment hold only one Mendix app or multiple? Our AWS resource cost quote came in the form of a list of “App Containers” which I assume are containers in the generic sense like described here and not AWS EC2 virtual machines. Is that accurate? When scaling an environment in the developer console does that change VMs or containers or just the amount of RAM in the previous? Can you describe or is there any documentation showing how environments/instances/app containers/apps map to AWS resource types?
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1 answers
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Mendix Cloud
There are different flavours in hosting a Mendix environment. If you opt for the mendix cloud, you basically get the managed version, where Mendix takes care of setting up the cloudfoundry DB & app infrastructure. 

  1. A single environment consists of the parts below. Depending on your requirements, you can request a test, acceptance and production environment. 
When you deploy an app to the cloud, whether it is a free app or a licensed app, it will consist of a number of parts:

Mendix Runtime – essentially one or more instances of your app running in a container
Routing layer
Network
Database
File storage service

https://docs.mendix.com/developerportal/deploy/licensing-apps
2. An environment contains a single Mendix app. However you can run multiple instances of the same app as a cluster.
3. Did you get the quotes for the Mendix cloud? Then most likely these are flat fee rates per environment. I
4. You scale the amount of dedicated memory per container. As for the CPU this is shared based on fair use between multiple containers on the CF platform.
https://docs.cloudfoundry.org/concepts/container-security.html#cpu

5.  The closest I could find is below, which describe the different components used, but not the exact specs.
https://www.mendix.com/evaluation-guide/enterprise-capabilities/cloud-architecture

Docker, Cloudfoundry

If you want more control over your infrastructure,  you could consider setting up your own Cloudfoundry or Docker containers on AWS, Azure, Cloudfoundry, SAP Cloud, IBM Cloud etc. Best is to read the documentation below for more details.

Documentation Docker Buildpack:

https://github.com/mendix/docker-mendix-buildpack

Documentation Cloudfoundry buildpack:

https://github.com/mendix/cf-mendix-buildpack

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