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Private cloud service - pros and cons
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Private cloud service - pros and cons

I am working at an affordable and easy to deploy private cloud project which should make VPS/VDS resellers life a lot easier. There are a few providers out there, but not many of them can answer the needs of clients from both pricing and features point of view. What would be your expectation from such a service? Do you have experience with private cloud?

Comments

  • wtf is a private cloud

    Thanked by 2Jorbox doghouch
  • Like Iwstack? (real cloud) DO? Vultr? or what?

  • jarjar Patron Provider, Top Host, Veteran
    edited September 2016

    @stasi said:
    wtf is a private cloud

    My understanding is that it's like this: You buy a few dedicated servers and set up your own hypervisors for scaling your own services. Hypervisors are dedicated to you and not shared with other customers.

    Effectively, one could call renting a dedi and installing OpenVZ a private cloud. It's just a bunch of confusing wording on top of a simple concept, as I understand it.

    Of course, a seller of private cloud generally has the space and intent to scale you upward on dedicated infrastructure well beyond that of a single cheap dedi, so the term generally does mean a little bit more in practice. That's why when you see it, expect no less than four digits after the dollar sign.

    Thanked by 2stasi deadbeef
  • It's not even summer anymore though?

  • teamaccteamacc Member
    edited September 2016
  • Never understood the cloud infrastructure. Seems this is a new name for a vps.

  • jarjar Patron Provider, Top Host, Veteran
    edited September 2016

    @WHT said:
    Never understood the cloud infrastructure. Seems this is a new name for a vps.

    Short version is simple: cloud server = self service resizable VPS. That's basically the entire thing if you simplify it down. The word has been romanticized into something more to a few.

    Thanked by 2WHT deadbeef
  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    jarland said: Short version is simple: cloud server = self service resizable VPS. That's basically the entire thing if you simplify it down. The word has been romanticized into something more to a few.

    You can resize on some traditional VPS platforms, though yeah, it's usually the admin who does it. But really, the main thing that differentiates cloud is hourly billing.

    Yeah. That's the cloud. A different billing model.

    Nearly anything else is vendor-specific. Some have block storage, some don't. Some offer a galaxy of add-on services (AWS, Azure), some don't. Etc. Hourly billing. To the cloud!

    stasi said: wtf is a private cloud

    They're pretty common, actually - at least, a lot of my peers in IT talk about them. But they're really just a private VM farm.

    I'd make an exception for people who are into the whole hyperconverged infrastructure thing, where essentially everything is virtual - switches, routers, etc. But still, it's a VM farm, really...

  • I've seen it how raindog explains sold by past companies I work for- dedicated hypervisor and sometimes internal IPs for the project

  • sinsin Member
    edited September 2016

    raindog308 said: They're pretty common, actually - at least, a lot of my peers in IT talk about them.

    Yup, lots of hosting companies sell private cloud as well (like OVH and Leaseweb).

  • Alex_znr said: What would be your expectation from such a service?

    I'd probably expect you to deal with all issues regarding the uptime of the hypervisor, and ensure it runs smoothly. Moreover, I'd presume that it makes the 'reseller' not much more than a glorified Avon representative - They just sell the crap, if anything goes wrong they'll point to the supplier.

    That's genuinely a lot to ask for if you're going to be dealing with idiots trying to resell space on these servers to make a quick penny - They'll have no idea what they're doing and will try to offload support to you.

    How do you respond when the performance is tanking because someone's decided to mine bitcoin and run a busy tor relay at the same time, is that your responsibility if you're in charge of the hypervisor?

    If you want to do it affordably for the client, your first problem to overcome would be to clearly define what your responsibilities are, and what isn't your problem.

    Perhaps you're asking the wrong crowd by asking here. It may make more sense for a web development company with mid-sized clients who want don't want to deal with too much of the operational side of things. Being the infrastructure behind a LEB host seems like a terrible idea.

    I'm genuinely interested to see how (and if) this pans out for you. Good luck.

  • BrianHarrisonBrianHarrison Member, Patron Provider

    @Alex_znr said:
    I am working at an affordable and easy to deploy private cloud project which should make VPS/VDS resellers life a lot easier. There are a few providers out there, but not many of them can answer the needs of clients from both pricing and features point of view. What would be your expectation from such a service? Do you have experience with private cloud?

    My two cents: make sure you really understand how you're making your new software or new business unique from what's already out there. You state that your value proposition is to make the lives of resellers a lot easier -- but there's already a great deal of turnkey automation out there... what makes your system better/unique?

  • DETioDETio Member
    edited September 2016

    @WHT said:
    Never understood the cloud infrastructure. Seems this is a new name for a vps.

    Cloud is just a buzzword for VPS, but it does generally have differences.

    One of them is that it is very flexible, you can launch VM's and delete them and only pay hourly. Meaning you don't have to rent a VPS for a month to test something. That makes them really scale able.

    The second differentiation is that Cloud Servers generally have some sort of protection and are 'elastic' - meaning that if a Hypervisor fails, the VM's are recovered automatically within ~10-20 minutes.

  • jarjar Patron Provider, Top Host, Veteran
    edited September 2016

    @DETio said:
    The second differentiation is that Cloud Servers generally have some sort of protection and are 'elastic' - meaning that if a Hypervisor fails, the VM's are recovered automatically within ~10-20 minutes.

    Please don't add support to this misinformation. Cloud computing in no way includes a specification for this, and the false information people propagate around it leads people to assume cloud providers are either offering not stated redundancy or are therefore not cloud providers.

    No provider offers that kind of recovery unless clearly stated. It is not at all common. Most providers still use local storage in each hypervisor for the VMs. The misinformation makes it difficult to explain the importance of backups.

    Applications built on top of a cloud infrastructure, however, should be built in a way that can easily recover from a hypervisor failure.

  • TheLinuxBugTheLinuxBug Member
    edited September 2016

    I am not sure where you guys got your definitions, but Cloud to me and in my business has always meant high availability with the added benefit of quick scaling either by reboot or auto-scaling to be able to reach customers needs. HA would include replicated disk images which would make fail-over to a secondary hypervisor in the event of a physical hardware failure almost immediate.

    I personally don't know where the whole hourly billing necessity came from, but in my understanding it has always been used to suggest HA redundancy of the platform your on, not how you pay for it.

    In Cloud a single failure should not render your assets offline for more than a short period of time (time needed to restart the server on secondary hypervisor). If there is no HA included in your product than it isn't technically 'Cloud' in my opinion.

    DigitalOcean has always wanted 'Cloud' to mean hourly billing and elastic resources (failing to include any type of HA), but that is not really what the term was meant to mean in the beginning.

    There is not a set in stone definition for the word, so in the end we are all 'right' and it can really mean 'anything you want it to', but I always believed high availability was implied by the term. I would think this particularly true of the expectations of someone buying a 'Private Cloud' as well.

    my 2 cents.

    Cheers!

    Thanked by 1jar
  • jarjar Patron Provider, Top Host, Veteran
    edited September 2016

    Know that I reply to you in a friendly and loving tone, because I know that you often mistake my tone as angrily argumentative. That is not intended.

    TheLinuxBug said: but Cloud to me and in my business has always meant high availability

    It has never meant high availability by any scholarly definition of cloud computing that I am aware of. The accepted standard for cloud computing is defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology:

    http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/SP/nistspecialpublication800-145.pdf

    Cloud is an excellent way to build high availability at the application layer, and this information has been reduced to shorthand over the years that leads to people saying cloud = high availability. It does not. You would need redundant storage blocks on two or more network attached storage to remove the hypervisor from being a single point of failure and not simply replacing it with a network-attached single point of failure, and I would challenge you to consider the difficulties of this implementation on the industry standard virtualizations used (short of proprietary solutions that are best for high priced local enterprise implementations). It isn't impossible, but it is so challenging and expensive that almost no one is doing this for your VM (though might be for additional storage volumes).

    For this reason, a single VPS should never be considered to be any safer due to the use of the word "cloud" than when the word is not used, and to suggest otherwise is to imply that backups are less important on cloud providers, whether you intend to indicate that or not. I need not explain the problems that misinformation creates for me, as it is the reason that I speak up. I don't seek to be right; I seek to implore customers and potential customers not to consider "cloud" to be any form of data protection over a regular VPS provider unless explicitly stated. I need them to understand that and make backups accordingly, and I know that storing a VM's disk on a hypervisor's RAID is by far the most common implementation. I long for the day when this is no longer true, and we're surely approaching it.

    TheLinuxBug said: DigitalOcean has always wanted 'Cloud' to mean hourly billing and elastic resources (failing to include any type of HA), but that is not really what the term was meant to mean in the beginning.

    Then I would challenge you to check your sources of information.

    TheLinuxBug said: There is not a set in stone definition for the word

    No there is very much a standard for it. You can go out and say that SATA can also be a CDROM because you made a CDROM and called it SATA, or that someone posted it enough times on enough forums to confuse people, but it doesn't change that SATA is a defined standard.

    Now, if all that is too much or too easily disagreed upon, think of it another way. If providers intend for the cloud to not refer to high availability at the hypervisor layer, and customers intend for the cloud to refer to high availability at the hypervisor layer, which of the two is more likely misleading potential clients of the industry by referring to their definition and insisting upon it? If you insist that cloud = HA, then you are teaching people that cloud = HA. Then they go out into an industry where cloud does not equal HA, and they have to learn the hard way that their definition is not shared by the majority of the providers using the word. Be careful, others are listening. I only ask you not to mislead them. I see the frustration people have first hand when they learn this for the first time, and it's entirely avoidable.

    Thanked by 1abytecurious
  • Generally this would be >=1 dedicated hypervisors, some half decent virtualisation and management software and server management for the hypervisors. OVH, Rackspace and others do it.

    We were looking into this since we occasionally get asked about hosting, but the pricing just made no sense relative to reselling VMs the normal way.

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