The main news of the month: we started public testing of a new service - "virtual private cloud". Anyone can get their hands on their own cloud infrastructure, a flexible, manageable, scalable and able to cope with any load.
On the possibilities and advantages of the new service, we describe in detail below.
Introduction
Cloud technologies we have been for a long time and closely monitor the situation in the market of services. We drew attention to the following point: European providers of cloud services almost nobody offers solutions that fully meet the requirements of corporate customers.First, we should mention the public cloud - perhaps this is the most common by far the type of services in the area under discussion. They are well suited for individuals and small companies - in a cloud, even inexperienced users the strength enough to quickly set up a website or run a small application.
With more complex use cases clouds are often problems: for example, the absence of a public API may hinder the integration of cloud machines with other applications, and the inability to load your own images leads to the need for manual configuration of each server, and in some cases does not allow to use the right software.
Scope of the public cloud in the corporate practice is also very limited: on this basis, you can create a corporate portal or organize paperwork for a small company, but as a medium for the deployment of complex business applications they already use complicated - there are questions relating to the delimitation of rights between employees or the convenience of planning. It is typical that the actual owner of the account is the one person who is engaged in resource planning another, and configuring the server - even a whole department. Access to the cloud at the same time is only possible on behalf of the user, which is registered in the account; for corporate users is understandably unacceptable.
Alternatively, the public may make a private cloud (private) cloud based on its own or leased infrastructure. Unfortunately, the organization and content of the private cloud requires usually substantial financial investments at an early stage and can be effective in many situations.
It should also be noted that many existing solutions are focused primarily on the vertical scale - manual or automatic increase performance of virtual servers as the load increases.
However, when it comes to very high loads (arising, for example, when working with "heavy" enterprise applications), possibly used in the cloud hardware and software components will not allow infinitely increase the performance of individual virtual machines.
In addition, the vertical scaling in the cloud can sometimes be very disadvantageous from a financial point of view on the principle of payment of pay-as-you-go (i.e. actual consumption) for unplanned loads can turn a very unpleasant surprise. For corporate clients such payment principle makes it difficult to plan expenditure - in most cases it is difficult to predict what resources will be consumed machine running under real load.
In many situations, it is more effective scaling. In theory, it can provide a much greater overall productivity. However, in practice this is often difficult to scale because of the complexity of adding the components in the infrastructure and the need to carefully plan the application architecture.
The argument in favor of horizontal scaling is a common configuration management systems, such as Puppet or Chef. These tools allow almost completely automate the addition of new components to a cluster, thereby increasing its overall productivity without additional labor costs.
Virtual Private Cloud
Technology evolves, the requirements for the clouds grow, but in the European market has not yet appeared of the product, which would take into account all of the latest trends. Working on our new service, we tried to focus on the needs of business and provide maximum flexibility and the opportunity to build cloud environments, adaptable for any task. The new service is called "virtual private cloud".
Among today's cloud services, this service has a special place. This - not the public cloud in the traditional sense, but not a private cloud, belonging to one client. We rent an isolated cloud infrastructure, in which the user can create virtual machines, connected block device, upload images of virtual machines, and configure the network topology of any complexity and to perform many other operations. New cloud is controlled by an open API, allowing you to integrate it with other applications.
