What Are Cloudlets and Who Are They For?

Nov 11, 2026

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What Are Cloudlets and Who Are They For?

PaaS, containers, Cloudlets—who knows how many times you’ve heard these terms without fully knowing what they can do for your business, precisely. Or, better yet, should you even care about this stuff? Well, that’s what this article is all about. Boiling it all down into simple terms so you can determine if Cloudlets are going to be helpful for you or not.

Ok, first things first. What’s the simplest way of understanding Cloudlets? What’s the ELI5 version?

• A hyperscaler is a giant company that offers cloud computing services on a massive scale. We’re assuming you know what these computing services can be—basically software/web stuff that’s done remotely without you having to purchase expensive hardware. By design, a hyperscaler is complex stuff. You need to pay more and have a dedicated ops team.
• Platform-as-a-Service is a term coined for, well, a service that’s essentially a platform. On this platform, you can log in, manage users, set up workflows, integrate apps and dashboards, etc.
• Cloudlets is a PaaS. But it has two unique caveats.
  • Cloudlets is scalable. It grows and shrinks with demand. You don’t need to reserve a specific, dedicated amount of hardware of bandwidth. It’s elastic.
  • It runs your apps and workflows inside containers with their individual controls and growing/shrinking nature.

Summing it all up, what Cloudlets does is offer you all the power of the cloud, flexibly, without the complexity and the ops team of a hyperscaler. Below, we’ll clarify what Cloudlets is, how the scaling works, and who it suits.

What is Cloudlets?

Cloudlets is a PaaS built on the Jelastic platform. VPSBlocks is Australia’s home for it. This service hosts your business applications in containers on managed Australian infrastructure. What it does is detach your application’s work from the underlying server maintenance and server setup complexities.

A container is a small, self-contained package holding an app + everything it needs to run. It’s portable and quick to deploy. You can run PHP, Java, Node.js, Ruby, Python, and Go apps right through to Docker containers, Kubernetes clusters, and Docker Swarm, all on a single platform using these containers within Cloudlets.

On a VPS, you run and maintain the OS yourself. On Cloudlets, the platform handles the underlying infrastructure, and you work through a clean dashboard (plus SSH, API, and CLI if you want them). And you do get some neat quality-of-life perks here: one-click installs from a marketplace, free and custom SSL on all apps and services, built-in monitoring of resources such as RAM, CPU, network, storage, and IO with the ability to set up alerts when things start to become tight.

How Does Scaling Work?

Scaling is what sets Cloudlets apart—or at least, it’s one of the more important reasons why many prefer and successfully use it over, say, AWS or VPS setups. There are two types of automatic scaling here:

1. Vertical Scaling: The platform adds or removes resources, such as CPU and RAM, to a container based on that app’s current demand. Otherwise, you’d need to do this manually, foresee load, dive into usage patterns, check past history of how these resources are used, etc. The container system, however, eliminates all that micromanagement (and stress). The container can grow and shrink based on demand, keeping your costs very much aligned with what you’re actually using.
2. Horizontal Scaling: When under load, your clustered containers will be scaled out (more copies) or back in, so traffic spikes don’t take you down. This is a critical advantage your business might be in need of.

As you can see, this is very much pay-as-you-use. You’re only billed for the resources your app actually ends up consuming per cycle. There’s no fixed box you pay for regardless of the app being busy or idle.

All resources are measured in “cloudlets,” which are basically the Jelastic standard of 128 MiB RAM + 400 MHz CPU each. As there’s no overprovisioning for a peak that might only happen twice a year, while there’s also no falling over when that peak arrives, Cloudlets makes a lot of business sense for apps. You just set your minimum and maximum limits, and the platform lives within them.

Who Cloudlets Are For?

There are some businesses that are just built for using Cloudlets. But then there are more use cases that you might not have considered at all. We’ll cover them all.

First, let’s take a look at the obvious target audience of Cloudlets.

These are developers who want stack freedom and businesses running web apps, ecommerce, or portals that need to scale. Simple as that.

But then there are a few other use cases as well. These types of apps or businesses can really benefit from Cloudlets.

• Seasonal businesses that often experience spikes, like ecommerce stores running Black Friday and EOFY sales causing a lot of surge, event ticketing businesses, etc., where a well-known, timed crush is inevitable, can scale up for the spike and pay normal rates the rest of the time.
• Cloudlets also work surprisingly well for devs who need instant staging environments. You can use full application cloning, which lets you spin up a copy of production to test a change, then discard it—all without needing a second server just sitting there the rest of the time and costing you money.
• You can also consolidate scattered tools with a Cloudlets. Self-hosting the apps a business currently uses on a per-seat basis is a real-world use case that many can benefit from.
• If you run an agency that hosts many client sites, you can use Cloudlets to set up clustered, isolated environments with team access controls and per-environment resource limits.
• It can also be a safer AWS alternative for SMEs. Businesses that would very much like to have cloud scalability but don’t have (or want to hire) a dedicated DevOps team to wrangle it can seriously consider Cloudlets.

But all that being said, it’s not for everyone. If you just need a small static site, then shared hosting is enough. If you want total OS-level control and a fixed cost (more practical for many businesses), a plain VPS is preferred.

Neil