Launch of the Virtual Private Cloud service
We have already written about the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) service . Today, we are finally reporting the news that many of you have been waiting for: the beta testing of the new service has ended, and we are launching it in commercial operation. In this article, we will talk in detail about the options for using the new cloud, as well as at what tariffs its use will be paid.
Why it is needed: use cases
As already noted in the previous publication, the Virtual Private Cloud service will be especially interesting for corporate clients. Using our service, they will be able to get the following benefits:
- Significant reduction in hardware costs. Hundreds of projects can be deployed on the basis of leased cloud resources, and this will be much cheaper compared to using real hardware: there will be no need to purchase expensive equipment and attract additional staff to service it.
- Ease of cost planning. Rental of computing resources of the cloud is charged according to a flexible and transparent scheme, which allows you to accurately calculate costs and predict the savings that VPC provides.
- The speed of deployment of infrastructure. In VPC, you can set up a virtual infrastructure with the necessary characteristics in a matter of minutes. From an appropriately configured cloud, for example, you can easily deploy IT infrastructure for a new office. There will also be no serious problems with scaling: if necessary, you can always just buy new resources.
Let's consider in more detail the most common scenarios for using a virtual private cloud for corporate purposes.
Building separate infrastructure for different departments / projects
In any organization, as a rule, there are several departments or projects that are not interconnected. When using a public cloud in this case, you have to either bind the infrastructure to a single account (which is very doubtful from a security point of view) or register many accounts, which also causes many inconveniences.
A virtual private cloud allows you to avoid all the described problems: for each organizational unit, a separate project is created with limited quotas for the use of resources. Users from different departments will never be able to access each other's resources.
Ordinary employees of the organization will have access only to strictly defined virtual machines that host strictly defined resources.
Other users with administrator rights can access the project using external control panels, which implement all the functions of managing virtual machines, disks and networks, but there is no possibility to purchase resources.
Migrate existing infrastructure to the cloud
Many organizations have to deal with a situation where the support of their own virtualized infrastructure begins to cost too much: the organization of redundant power supply and Internet connection, the involvement of additional specialists, the purchase of equipment and the replacement of faulty components are required ... It seems logical to transfer all or part of the infrastructure in this situation to the cloud. But this is often fraught with difficulties: all software has to be reinstalled from scratch. An additional complication is that cloud service providers often impose a lot of restrictions, which has to make significant changes to the architecture.
Especially for corporate clients who want to transfer their own infrastructure to us, we have taken a number of measures to facilitate migration:
- our cloud provides the ability to import ready-made images of virtual machines (all common formats are supported);
- the network topology in our VPC can be configured arbitrarily; if you used a local area network (or even several local area networks) together with a public network, you can easily implement this with us;
- our virtualization system allows you to run virtual machines running any OS - if you suddenly need, for example, Solaris or FreeBSD, they can be installed without problems.
SaaS for customers
Some companies for one reason or another do not transfer their own infrastructure to the cloud, but would not mind organizing the provision of cloud resources for contractors and customers. Our new cloud is well suited for this use case: in it you can create virtual jobs and organize access to corporate information resources from anywhere in the world.
Peak Handling
In the activities of any organization, seasonal peaks are observed, during which the IT infrastructure is under the greatest burden (in financial organizations these may be periods of preparation and delivery of reports, in commercial enterprises - the New Year period, etc.). During such periods, additional IT resources may be required, but it is hardly justified to purchase additional hardware and software for the sake of two to three weeks a year. It is much easier and cheaper to rent virtual resources, which are also easily scalable.
Running in new projects
It often happens that an organization launches a new project and it is not clear how much it will consume resources. Of course, buying expensive iron to run a new project is irrational. But to conduct experiments on the basis of the existing infrastructure is also unsafe: there is always a risk of an unexpected sharp increase in loads.
In such a situation, renting cloud computing resources may be the best solution. Based on VPC, you can create an experimental site for stress testing and running a new project.
Based on the results of running the project in the cloud, you can assess how much resources it will consume, and build a strategy for its further development.
Optimization of the development process and software testing
Our new cloud can also be used as a platform for software testing. If the test environment is close to the actual operating conditions of the product, then the probability of errors in the final version will significantly decrease.
Based on our cloud, you can very quickly create test environments with the necessary parameters. Among the advantages of using VPC for testing are the following:
- Insulation. Each product requires a separate test environment, as it is done by a separate development team. In VPC, you can create several projects with the environment necessary for testing and grant each team access to its own pool. Thanks to isolation, labor productivity is significantly increased: programmers will not interfere with each other, and system administrators will be able to debug components without causing any inconvenience to developers.
- Deployment Speed. Using the Heat Orchestration Module, you can quickly create test environments with any characteristics. Even if the test pool is damaged for one reason or another, you can not restore it, but simply deploy a new one based on existing templates.
Using virtual machines for testing will reduce the time and cost of deploying test environments and configuring test environments.
On the basis of VPC it is also possible to organize general access to the product for both members of the development team and users - this will help speed up the process of finding and fixing bugs.
Reselling
The service "Virtual Private Cloud" opens up wide opportunities for beginning Internet entrepreneurs: web studios, providers of shared hosting, game services and others. You can build your own projects based on the resources we rent, and then resell them to your customers.
Especially for resellers, we have provided the ability to customize external control panels. You can configure everything so that clients will not know that their virtual machines are running on the basis of our infrastructure.
Tariffing
General principles
Using the service "Virtual Private Cloud", you pay for the amount of resources at your disposal. After the resources are reserved, payment for them is deducted from the balance every hour. It will be charged regardless of whether resources are used or not. When calculating the payment, the maximum indicator of each resource per hour is taken into account. If, for example, within an hour you change the project quotas several times, the calculation of the payment will be calculated based on the maximum values.
In the control panel of each project there is a button "Optimize quotas" - clicking on it, you can bring the project quotas in accordance with the resources consumed. Thanks to this, you will never have to pay for resources that are not actually used.
System resources: features of payment
Processor cores
You can rent any number of processor cores. Only whole kernels are provided for rent, up to 100% of the load. To avoid an unexpected lack of resources, the required amount of processor time is reserved on each host. If you change the number of processor cores, the machine can be migrated to another host.
Memory
For each project, you can request any amount of RAM in megabytes. Memory is fully backed up when creating virtual machines.
Disks
In the cloud, you can rent two types of drives: basic and fast.
The basic disk in performance corresponds to enterprise-class SATA disks. It is suitable for use in projects whose work does not require frequent reading and writing of information.
Fast Disk is an SSD-based solution. Response time and speed have been improved several times over the base disk.
Image storage
We have already mentioned that our repository provides the ability to work with ready-made images of virtual machines. All images are placed in a special storage. Its use is charged according to the same scheme as the use of a basic disk.
Floating IPs
We already talked about floating IP addresses in a previous publication: inside the virtual machine, all ports are listened to on a private ("gray") address, and outside the machine is accessible on a public ("white") address. This technology is well suited for light workload projects. Its undoubted advantage is flexibility: a floating IP address can always be detached from one machine and attached to another.
Public subnets
We can provide users of the Virtual Private Cloud service with a subnet of 5 public ("white") addresses in a separate VLAN. This method of providing access to the Internet has been tested for years and seems more reliable. At the start, we provide subnets of five addresses.
Windows Licenses
If you plan to create virtual machines running OC Windows in the cloud, you do not need to purchase a license separately: we provide it for rent. The rental price includes regular updates. Windows licenses are charged at a fixed rate every hour.
Network traffic
For each account, three terabytes of external traffic are provided free of charge each month. According to preliminary estimates, this should be enough for most small and medium-sized projects.
As soon as the established limit is exceeded, funds will be debited from the balance every hour to pay for traffic - both incoming and outgoing.
To optimize costs, traffic can be purchased in advance at preferential rates. This proposal should primarily be of interest to customers working with large amounts of data.
VPC Balance
When you create a new project or change the quota of an existing project, a special counter in the control panel will show for what period the funds available on the balance should be enough. This will help you avoid unexpected shutdowns of all servers due to lack of funds on your balance.
Conclusion
So, the new service is launched - join and use. We look forward to your questions, comments and suggestions on its further development and improvement.
Naturally, at the current level we are not going to linger for a long time. We have big plans for the development of VPC. In particular, in the near future there will be many additional services: new types of disks (even faster than those currently offered), rental of load balancers and much more.
We also plan to continue the series of publications on VPC in our blog. Follow the news!
Readers who for one reason or another cannot post comments here are welcome to our blog.
