Directus Cloud GA

March 7, 2022

Directus Cloud is the cloud version of its revolutionary Open Data Platform, Directus. A tiered offering built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Directus Cloud features a proven backend infrastructure, lightning-fast performance, a new more intuitive dashboard, and a growing number of cloud-exclusive extensions to enhance the platform’s features and capabilities. This announcement follows the recent introduction of Directus 9, completing the platform’s transition from beta to production-ready.

Directus is the only solution of its kind offered as both a free, on-premises solution as well as a tiered cloud offering. Since its inception, the Directus platform has been completely free and open-source, with no paywalls or feature ceiling. With the introduction of Directus Cloud, Directus offers all levels of users – from enterprise organizations to hobbyists – an easy and cost-effective way to get up and running in seconds, and start building innovative, data-driven digital experiences and internal apps immediately.

“Directus Cloud eliminates the heavy lift of designing, building, and maintaining infrastructure to support the Directus platform, so users can get up and running in seconds and focus on innovation,” said Ben Haynes, founder and CEO of Directus. “We’ve spent years obsessing over our cloud architecture so we can provide our customers with the most secure, performant, and scalable data infrastructure possible. Directus Cloud is incredibly fast, regardless of the size or location of your organization – whether you're a small startup or a Fortune 100 company.”

In addition to the Directus software itself, the Directus Cloud includes all of the infrastructure necessary to run and use the Directus platform, including the database, serverless cluster, load balancer, file storage and a global CDN. The solution is modular and incrementally adoptable, which enables organizations to start off small and then expand their usage as needed.

Directus Cloud is available in three versions:

Community Cloud: Ideal for Directus demos, proofs-of-concept and hobby projects, Directus Community Cloud is a completely free tier of the core Directus Cloud service, which also includes access to cloud-exclusive extensions. Available to anyone interested in building innovative, data-driven experiences, Community Cloud has everything you need to get started with Directus, with asset storage, a global CDN, and 24/7 system monitoring. Users can choose to start fresh and create a project from scratch, or leverage a pre-configured demo project to get a feel for Directus. They also benefit from Community Support, an official Directus Discord server filled with thousands of engineers.

Standard Cloud: This version is perfect for powering small to medium-sized production projects and is delivered via a usage-based pricing model. Users can configure the exact hardware they need and apply customized auto-scaling rules, to enjoy the granularity and low cost of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) with the full SaaS version of Directus layered on top. The Standard Cloud offering is supported by a global content delivery network (CDN) to ensure lightning-fast speed regardless of location, as well as vertical and horizontal auto-scaling configurable by the customer, to accommodate spikes and lulls in traffic and usage. Additionally, Standard Cloud comes with automated backups to protect customers’ data and applications, and automated updates to ensure users benefit from Directus’ aggressive release schedule. Standard Cloud customers can seamlessly upgrade to Enterprise Cloud, when ready.

Enterprise Cloud: Providing flexibility and scale to power large projects or entire organizations, Directus Enterprise Cloud is completely customizable and offers an array of additional features and custom extensions. In addition to benefiting from all of the features of the Standard Cloud offering, enterprise customers can configure everything from rate limiting, to caching, to authentication. Their instance runs on dedicated servers in a single-tenant environment, and they can designate their regional server location to further optimize global performance. Enterprise customers have access to Premium Support from the Directus team in addition to Community Support, as well as a minimum 99.9% Service Level Agreement (SLA) for uptime and custom SLAs for response time.

“We had departments using many different CMS that ranged from extremely expensive to open-source projects,” said Dr. Brian Myers, Senior Software Engineer, Bose. “Directus has proven to be better than all the others.”

Directus provides unlimited flexibility, with no hard feature ceiling and no vendor lock-in. The solution installs on top of and mirrors existing SQL databases, without altering any schema or content. Database administrators maintain full control, and the data remains pristine and portable. This makes it easy to ingest, fetch or update data using the Directus REST+GraphQL API, JavaScript SDK or even pure SQL. The platform is 100 percent JavaScript with full support for every major SQL vendor, to perfectly complement the modern stack and offer a bevy of advanced features such as custom data workflows, 10X better performance, granular permissions, Directus Insights, and more.