August 4, 2014 at 15:12We analyze the advertising advantages of cloud hosting: the answer of the cloud provider
Some time ago, a critical article appeared in the service of selecting virtual servers PoiskVPS.ru “ Twisted in the clouds: we analyze the advertising advantages of cloud hosting ”. The author of the article and the service habraiser leonid239 pretty skeptical about the popularity of cloud servers, mentioning in his comparison, including Cloud4Y . We simply could not get past such an enchanting arrangement of points, and decided to publish our answer, having examined the analysis itself by points.
We decided to answer point by point, highlighting the points of the original article:
Advertising says: fast scaling.
Fast scaling is one of the features of cloud hosting. The fastest scaling is a particular case of it - the Autoscale service, which has one feature - in automatic mode, additional resources are connected to peak loads, which you naturally have to pay for. Thanks to the flexible configuration and setting of maximum resource allocation thresholds, a situation with a significantly increased service bill can be avoided.
Advertising says: clouds are cheap
The question of price is a question of value of the price itself. That is, what the client receives for one or another amount. What level of hardware, what guarantees, the possibility of placement abroad, what software according to the SaaS model, what payment schemes, what guaranteed SLA, etc. ... There are many examples here. The main thing remains one - high quality and reliability cannot be cheap. We'll have to choose: either cheap - or efficiently and reliably.
Advertising says: we provide a free trial period. In fact, it turns out that a free test is provided only for minimal configurations, which are not enough if I want to test, for example, the operation of SSDs or CPUs over 4.
We provide test access, including for large configurations, if you need to test in real time, for example, the speed of work, fast SSDs - we give this opportunity. You can test not only CPU, RAM, HDD, channel speed, but also the configuration of 1C Enterprise, as well as 1C Bitrix: Corporate Portal. At the end of the test period, if you choose us as a supplier, there is no need to re-create the infrastructure when switching to a commercial basis: all data remains and you continue to use the cloud on a commercial basis on a postpaid basis.
Advertising says: there are flexible rates in the clouds.
When we say that we offer flexible tariffs, we really offer flexible tariffs :) On the main page of our website there is a price configurator where you can select resources for your requirements, be it 1CPU and 5 GB RAM or 4CPU and 2 GB RAM , the same applies to other resources, for example, we offer HDDs of different speeds (4 options) from slow to store static files to fast SSDs with guaranteed IOPS.
For the test you can get up to 32 CPUs, 96 GB RAM and 300 GB HDD. Typically, this resource pool is sufficient to test most tasks. If necessary, the pool of test resources can be increased.
Advertising says: pay only for what you need.
Due to the ability to adjust the server for themselves, the hosters lose part of the profit if the client takes exactly what he needs, and not with a margin, as if he took the usual VPS with fixed tariffs. However, nobody likes to lose profits, therefore such a loss has already been recorded in the cost of resources, and as a result, a cloud server with parameters identical to the virtual one is more expensive.
One of our main concepts is that the client pays only for what he really needs and on a postpaid scheme. Perhaps if the client took resources with a margin, then our profit would be higher, but in this case we will move away from the cloud concept and deprive the client of the convenience for which he chose us. And this in turn leads to the fact that there can be no talk of any long-term cooperation.
And most importantly, the clouds are completely immune from earthly troubles: if the light goes out in the data center or the tractor driver cuts off the optics, then it will be completely different for customers, whether they have a cloud server or a virtual one.
We had a similar “experience” with a tractor driver;) We were killed in optics with a tractor bucket, and, unfortunately, no one is safe from this. But since our infrastructure has an optical ring without points of failure with duplicated channels, customers did not notice anything.
And if one of the 100 servers crashed on a hoster, only 1% of clients would have problems.
In the event of failure of any client server, technologies such as VMware High Availability are applied normally, that is, automatic restart of virtual machines on another server (including in another data center) within 5-10 minutes.
Indeed, all companies have problems, Amazon is no exception, but it’s important to understand what a company has done to fix the problems and what it has done to avoid them in the future.
We openly publish incidents, record and comment on each of them. In particular, after a major DDoS attack at the end of last year, we published comments on the incident and provided information on the prevention of such incidents, namely:
Advertising says: in the clouds, the SLA service availability is 99.9%.
I will not be the first to say that everything happens in life and sooner or later providers have accessibility problems. At one time, 3 days at Amazon solved the problems with the availability of EC2 and RDS. Nevertheless, I want some guarantees that providers simply do not have.
We provide accessibility at the level of 99.9% in the basic version - that is, for all customers, regardless of the size of the company. For some customers, an SLA of 99.99% is possible. These warranties are legally enshrined in the “Service Level Agreement”. A full list of documents is available for review on the site.
SLA at the level of 99.9% - we consider it very responsible and are working hard to justify such statements.
For this reason we use:
Nevertheless, we agree with the author’s conclusion: if clouds are used, then people need them. Our turnover is constantly growing. And we will be glad if this post also helps someone to realize that the time of clouds for him has come.
We decided to answer point by point, highlighting the points of the original article:
Advertising says: fast scaling.
Fast scaling is one of the features of cloud hosting. The fastest scaling is a particular case of it - the Autoscale service, which has one feature - in automatic mode, additional resources are connected to peak loads, which you naturally have to pay for. Thanks to the flexible configuration and setting of maximum resource allocation thresholds, a situation with a significantly increased service bill can be avoided.
Advertising says: clouds are cheap
The question of price is a question of value of the price itself. That is, what the client receives for one or another amount. What level of hardware, what guarantees, the possibility of placement abroad, what software according to the SaaS model, what payment schemes, what guaranteed SLA, etc. ... There are many examples here. The main thing remains one - high quality and reliability cannot be cheap. We'll have to choose: either cheap - or efficiently and reliably.
Advertising says: we provide a free trial period. In fact, it turns out that a free test is provided only for minimal configurations, which are not enough if I want to test, for example, the operation of SSDs or CPUs over 4.
We provide test access, including for large configurations, if you need to test in real time, for example, the speed of work, fast SSDs - we give this opportunity. You can test not only CPU, RAM, HDD, channel speed, but also the configuration of 1C Enterprise, as well as 1C Bitrix: Corporate Portal. At the end of the test period, if you choose us as a supplier, there is no need to re-create the infrastructure when switching to a commercial basis: all data remains and you continue to use the cloud on a commercial basis on a postpaid basis.
Advertising says: there are flexible rates in the clouds.
When we say that we offer flexible tariffs, we really offer flexible tariffs :) On the main page of our website there is a price configurator where you can select resources for your requirements, be it 1CPU and 5 GB RAM or 4CPU and 2 GB RAM , the same applies to other resources, for example, we offer HDDs of different speeds (4 options) from slow to store static files to fast SSDs with guaranteed IOPS.
For the test you can get up to 32 CPUs, 96 GB RAM and 300 GB HDD. Typically, this resource pool is sufficient to test most tasks. If necessary, the pool of test resources can be increased.
Advertising says: pay only for what you need.
Due to the ability to adjust the server for themselves, the hosters lose part of the profit if the client takes exactly what he needs, and not with a margin, as if he took the usual VPS with fixed tariffs. However, nobody likes to lose profits, therefore such a loss has already been recorded in the cost of resources, and as a result, a cloud server with parameters identical to the virtual one is more expensive.
One of our main concepts is that the client pays only for what he really needs and on a postpaid scheme. Perhaps if the client took resources with a margin, then our profit would be higher, but in this case we will move away from the cloud concept and deprive the client of the convenience for which he chose us. And this in turn leads to the fact that there can be no talk of any long-term cooperation.
And most importantly, the clouds are completely immune from earthly troubles: if the light goes out in the data center or the tractor driver cuts off the optics, then it will be completely different for customers, whether they have a cloud server or a virtual one.
We had a similar “experience” with a tractor driver;) We were killed in optics with a tractor bucket, and, unfortunately, no one is safe from this. But since our infrastructure has an optical ring without points of failure with duplicated channels, customers did not notice anything.
And if one of the 100 servers crashed on a hoster, only 1% of clients would have problems.
In the event of failure of any client server, technologies such as VMware High Availability are applied normally, that is, automatic restart of virtual machines on another server (including in another data center) within 5-10 minutes.
Indeed, all companies have problems, Amazon is no exception, but it’s important to understand what a company has done to fix the problems and what it has done to avoid them in the future.
We openly publish incidents, record and comment on each of them. In particular, after a major DDoS attack at the end of last year, we published comments on the incident and provided information on the prevention of such incidents, namely:
- introduced additional communication channels
- introduced traffic filtering
- increased the number of uplinks
- added a secure feast, added the ability to transfer traffic through Voxility - the largest provider of Anti-DDoS solutions
Advertising says: in the clouds, the SLA service availability is 99.9%.
I will not be the first to say that everything happens in life and sooner or later providers have accessibility problems. At one time, 3 days at Amazon solved the problems with the availability of EC2 and RDS. Nevertheless, I want some guarantees that providers simply do not have.
We provide accessibility at the level of 99.9% in the basic version - that is, for all customers, regardless of the size of the company. For some customers, an SLA of 99.99% is possible. These warranties are legally enshrined in the “Service Level Agreement”. A full list of documents is available for review on the site.
SLA at the level of 99.9% - we consider it very responsible and are working hard to justify such statements.
For this reason we use:
- own high-availability ring without a single point of failure, with a capacity of 180 Gbit, with an expansion of up to 800 Gbit;
- Blade-server IBM, NEC with duplicated power supply modules, control;
- Hypervisor Clustering (highability)
- NetApp storage with redundant controllers and a fault-tolerant RAID array;
- ExtremeNetworks 40g switches on the stack;
- CISCO routers in failover configuration (Failover);
- Duplication: paths to devices; Internet channels of large telecom operators; trunk routes between data centers;
- A wide network of data centers: 2 in Moscow, 1 in St. Petersburg, 1 in the Netherlands and 1 in Germany
Nevertheless, we agree with the author’s conclusion: if clouds are used, then people need them. Our turnover is constantly growing. And we will be glad if this post also helps someone to realize that the time of clouds for him has come.