Cloud hosting as it should be

    Last spring, we, the team of performix.ru , pondered how best to manage the free resources of the company. Our great interest, among other things, was caused by the cloud hosting services industry. Market research only fueled this interest: none of the tested solutions hit the jackpot of our preferences for cost, convenience, reliability and functionality. We shrugged, and, having estimated the financial side of the issue, began to make our decision.




    Today we want to present you the result of our work - cloud hosting FLOPS . Under the hood of our cloud is KVM virtualization , a software-controlled network and a software storage system (SHD). All components are orchestrated by a proprietary cloud management system. By the way, we are the first in Russia and one of the first in the world to launch a cloud using the aforementioned technological approaches to networking and data storage.

    The architectural innovations used in FLOPS allowed us to get rid of the main disease of any cloud hosting - the high cost of infrastructure, so we offer servers in the cloud at the price of ordinary VDS. You can verify this by looking at our rates. In fact, we are giving a number of new features unique to the cloud, without a single penny overpayment. In order to clarify, we immediately make a reservation - we are talking about price parity with commercial VDS; our tariffs should not be compared with the tariffs for nouname containers without SLA or with the prices for dedicated “servers” assembled from consumer iron.

    Possibilities of the public cloud FLOPS


    Change server resources without rebooting
    You can change the size of the memory and disk without rebooting the virtual server, that is, without interruption in servicing your customers.



    Data backup and high performance storage
    The data storage system we use provides for triple data backup. In addition to high storage reliability, you get a high-performance block device.

    Snapshots
    The ability to create state snapshots has long been a standard in desktop virtualization products, but it is practically absent in the solutions used in mass hosting.
    The main purpose of snapshots is data backup, that is, instantly saving the status of your server’s hard drive (for example, before updating the software or during a scheduled backup).




    Resource Consumption Monitoring
    We control all key metrics of client machines: free disk space, CPU consumption, local and public traffic consumption, disk and memory usage, average system load.
    Per-minute graphs for each of the listed metrics are available in the user's personal account.
    SMS-informing about important events is provided - for example, about shutting down or rebooting a server. In addition to ensuring accessibility, monitoring helps in solving other important tasks, for example, in assessing the load created by your software, or in predicting long-term hosting costs taking into account the growth of your projects.




    Free Gigabit LAN
    Each client receives a private gigabit network for organizing interconnection between virtual servers. Want to test some new fashionable MapReduce and still not get paid for traffic or renting physical servers? No problem, test with us.

    Cloning Virtual Machines
    As the name implies, the cloning operation creates a full copy of the existing virtual machine, which differs from the original only in network settings.

    Cloning allows you to deploy a cluster of arbitrary size in minutes.
    Are you developing a complex distributed system and need an infrastructure of a dozen servers? FLOPS allows you to expand the desired environment while your coffee is brewing.

    Linux and Windows operating systems
    One of the products of our company requires a cluster for its work, which consists of Linux and Windows machines, and it was important for us to implement full support for both operating systems in our own cloud.
    We currently support 6 distributions: CentOS 6, OpenSuse 12, Ubuntu 12, Debian 7, Fedora 17, Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter edition. By the way, deploying a virtual server with any operating system takes only a few seconds.




    Real-time billing and cost forecasting
    For many clients, the “floating” server cost inherent in the clouds is a new and unusual phenomenon, so we tried to ensure maximum transparency of billing.
    All debits from the personal account are made every minute. You always see the current balance of the personal account and the forecast of monthly expenses based on the consumption of resources for the last day.




    All the rest
    Of course, in addition to the above, we offer all the cloud-specific features: resetting a forgotten password without restarting the server, text or VNC console, working with public keys, and much more.

    What is not yet, but will be soon
    Soon, the service will be replenished with other useful features: flexible adjustment of network restrictions, auto-tuning of resources, mapped drives, domain registration, dns hosting, S3 storage, load balancer, IPv6 and a number of other features. We would be grateful for your thoughts on what services should be implemented in the first place.

    We hope that we have managed to arouse your interest in the cloud and invite you to test it in action: all accounts created before February 28 receive a starting balance of 1000 rubles - registration .

    Technical details are beyond the scope of the post, but we have something to tell on the subject, which we will do in one of the following posts.

    We thank you for your attention!

    UPD: Due to the habraeffect, Windows operating systems are put longer than usual. Do not be alarmed, this is normal.

    UPD2: For technical reasons, Windows Server 2008 is temporarily excluded from the available installation systems. The distribution will be available again after 21:00 Moscow time on February 6, 2013. We apologize for the inconvenience.

    UPD3: Windows Server 2008 is again available for installation.

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