Meet Parallels Automation for Cloud Infrastructure
Hi, habra people! We decided here to do some ungrateful work and to tell you that the other day Parallels was presented in Ckolkovo. We understand that the topic of Skolkovo is hot, but we are ready for this and we can safely share our experience with the fund, using the example of our four resident portfolio companies Skolkovo.
It seems to us interesting and noteworthy to tell about the new development Parallels is the first software made for the Skolkovo grant. Moreover, this important event somehow bypassed Habr, and meanwhile it’s about the birth of software in terms of its value equal to the launch of Amazon’s web services in 2006.
Sergey Belousov and Birger Sten, CEO of Parallels
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On March 2, 2012, Parallels announced the launch of the first international sales of Parallels Automation for Cloud Infrastructure (PACI). With this software, hosting providers and operators can rent a virtual infrastructure for cloud computing. Amazon already offers similar services under the Elastic Compute Cloud brand, and only for the period from January to December 2011, it earned about $ 1 billion from this service.
By releasing PACI, Parallels is arming hosters to fight for the virtualized infrastructure market. Hosters are invited to deploy "their" Amazon "on the basis of Parallels solutions and donate some of their equipment in the form of cloud servers of almost unlimited capacity.
Parallels Platform offers dynamically allocated computing power. The client gets the opportunity to create his own virtual data center, which will operate on the real server capacity of the provider. At the same time, virtual data center for the first time allows using containers (they are distinguished by high performance and density of virtual environments per physical server) or hypervisors.
Parallels has carefully studied the experience of Amazon customers. Instead of a rather tricky procedure for ordering computing power and disk space, PACI has a simple web interface. The amount of RAM, the number of cores, the desired frequency of the processor and other parameters are selected by light movements of the "sliders". The built-in billing system extremely simplifies the system for calculating resource consumption, which is often a critical indicator for small businesses. Full automation of all processes simplifies to a minimum work with PACI for the personnel of the provider.
With PACI, hosting providers will be able to compete with Amazon cloud services themselves. According to Parallels, the cloud services market will double in the next two years.
Wall at the Parallels Summit in Orlando
The red sector in the diagram is a cloud-based system infrastructure, including PACI and AWS. Now this sector expects a double growth with an unchanged number of players - it is unlikely in two years there will be a new “Amazon”. Developing such systems is extremely long and costly, even with Amazon they appeared as a by-product.
Parallels had its groundwork in the direction of cloud services, but these were experimental projects, that is, the development itself was conducted on a residual basis. Any company makes money and produces products sold now. Going to develop such a large-scale project was a risky and brave step.
As they say in Parallels, Skolkovo grant allowed to decide on the development of PACI. Five million dollars allowed to hire people, form a large development team and attract resources so that the product could be born.
How much will it be in demand in the market?
Now such cloud services as, for example, My warehouse and Megaplan have their own clouds and just rent servers in data centers. But in terms of business efficiency, they do not need to develop and maintain their own clouds - their task is to ensure the quality of their service. Such a technical question as hosting in the cloud is more profitable to take in IaaS from the hosting company.
The hosting services market itself has recently been a fairly primitive business - companies kept their own data centers and rented a place in the server rack. It was not very convenient and rational, but simple. Then virtualization came - it assumed the possibility of chopping the server “into noodles”. Make one large enough many small ones and donate these virtual servers one at a time, thereby significantly improving one of the main indicators of the hosting business - profit from the rack. With the advent of virtualization, this figure has increased significantly.
King Cloud by Karen Ka Ying Wong
Despite the difficult name, IaaS is the same virtual server. But usually VPS are rented with strictly defined parameters: memory, processor, disk size, etc. The idea to change the parameters of VPS on the fly hung in the air, but it was difficult to implement from the point of view of process automation to the level of “Press the button - you will get the result”. Here everything was not so simple.
It took a kind of software solution that would disable the data center system administrators from the chain and allow the provider's client to communicate with the server directly and change the adjustments as he (the client) desires. Even strong development teams in the service provider staff need to spend at least 2-3 years of time and several million dollars in cash to create a fully automated solution. This is exactly what Parallels has done.
On the rake of wanting to make your own platform “with blackjack and everything else”, many service providers from Canada to Japan arrived, although it is clear that from the point of view of opportunities this task is not realizable for everyone. Because the hosting business profile is hosting, not software development. And the company needs to think not about the technical appearance of the platform for IaaS, but about the degree of customer satisfaction, the introduction of new services and other things.
Amazon quickly realized the opportunities before it. In addition, the company has long accumulated excess server capacity, which was used quite rarely to service bursts of consumer activity on Amazon.com, which traditionally happened on Thanksgiving Day, before Christmas and on the eve of several more holidays. The rest of the time, Amazon's data centers worked far from the limit, but at the same time they pulled money out of the pocket of an online retailer to maintain the efficiency of this server farm. The idea of ​​renting the “extra” infrastructure lay on the surface.
Amazon attracted developers who, after a while, made the software “bundle” to all existing servers, developed a billing system and invented a web interface to work with the infrastructure and called the whole Amazon Web Services farm. AWS gave the broadest freedom, but it was too tough for everyone. The infrastructure's “cloudiness” and its scalability (that scalability, one of the cornerstones of cloud services) could only be used by a very clever and system administrator.
Scalability is an undeniable advantage.
For many mortals, doing something with AWS was a feat. Although in the direction of the AWS closely watched small and medium businesses. The then innovation of the Amazonians looked very attractive - they were the first to offer hourly rates for hosting services. Normal hosting then (and now in most cases) is ordered for a month.
The wealth of opportunities and the flexible (but not so humane) pricing of Amazon Web Services attracts customers from Russia to the “cloud” of the Internet giant. Two years ago, a lively example of the “Risovaska” project was raging on Habré.
“Russian Amazon” in this connection would have been very useful three years ago, at the time of publication of the post about “Risovas'ka”. Even now, the prospect of using a foreign service, reading documentation in English and calling foreign support scares ordinary entrepreneurs - especially if their businesses are not targeted for IT. Our entrepreneurs have just learned not to be afraid of hosting and use e-mail on their own domain. For them, it would be good to get VPS with on-the-fly variable parameters on the principle of one window along with the usual hosting, Internet connection service, IP-telephony and other basic services.
But the main thing is that the hoster benefits from this approach. First, the new service prevents the outflow of advanced (read, cash) customers towards the same Amazon. Secondly, the hoster gets the opportunity to form interesting tariff plans on the basis of the new service - this is good from the point of view of marketing, provides customers with a new service. Thirdly, the very title of a cloud provider gives yesterday’s hosting provider at least +50 to karma due to its halo of advancement and exclusivity. Being a Mercedes in the world of hosting is, you know, well worth it.
In conclusion, work ungrateful. Let's try to predict the demand for PACI and the demand for services created and provided with it. First - general market things. The photo above shows the likely growth dynamics of the IaaS segment in the global cloud business. Parallels expects the rental market for virtualized infrastructure to roughly double in size to $ 27 billion. The IaaS segment will grow at the expense of small hosting providers — that is, at the expense of those companies for which Parallels is positioning its solution. In addition to PACI, its “boxing” should also be recorded - the platform is deployed and configured in a couple of weeks. And, of course, the predictability of work. Unlike artisanal counterparts created by hosters “for themselves, not for sale,” PACI was tested in different conditions, on different infrastructure and in different types of load.
For such software and services provided on it, the market is already ready. Profit from the use of scalable services (for which, in fact, is intended PACI) is obvious for businesses of different specializations. For example, a flower online store can prepare for a surge in traffic on the eve of March 8 with a couple of clicks in the site control panel, calmly withstand a flurry of requests from distraught customers, earn a three-month profit rate, and only pay for the hours when it was used "Extra" infrastructure. Or a startup that makes a successful online application and grows faster than its creators expected. Both the florist and the developer of cloud applications have one thing in common: with the help of PACI-based IaaS, they will not pay too much and will be more competitive than before.
Want to know what the conditions will be for you? Order a trial version on the site .
It seems to us interesting and noteworthy to tell about the new development Parallels is the first software made for the Skolkovo grant. Moreover, this important event somehow bypassed Habr, and meanwhile it’s about the birth of software in terms of its value equal to the launch of Amazon’s web services in 2006.
Sergey Belousov and Birger Sten, CEO of Parallels
')
On March 2, 2012, Parallels announced the launch of the first international sales of Parallels Automation for Cloud Infrastructure (PACI). With this software, hosting providers and operators can rent a virtual infrastructure for cloud computing. Amazon already offers similar services under the Elastic Compute Cloud brand, and only for the period from January to December 2011, it earned about $ 1 billion from this service.
By releasing PACI, Parallels is arming hosters to fight for the virtualized infrastructure market. Hosters are invited to deploy "their" Amazon "on the basis of Parallels solutions and donate some of their equipment in the form of cloud servers of almost unlimited capacity.
Parallels Platform offers dynamically allocated computing power. The client gets the opportunity to create his own virtual data center, which will operate on the real server capacity of the provider. At the same time, virtual data center for the first time allows using containers (they are distinguished by high performance and density of virtual environments per physical server) or hypervisors.
Parallels has carefully studied the experience of Amazon customers. Instead of a rather tricky procedure for ordering computing power and disk space, PACI has a simple web interface. The amount of RAM, the number of cores, the desired frequency of the processor and other parameters are selected by light movements of the "sliders". The built-in billing system extremely simplifies the system for calculating resource consumption, which is often a critical indicator for small businesses. Full automation of all processes simplifies to a minimum work with PACI for the personnel of the provider.
With PACI, hosting providers will be able to compete with Amazon cloud services themselves. According to Parallels, the cloud services market will double in the next two years.
Wall at the Parallels Summit in Orlando
The red sector in the diagram is a cloud-based system infrastructure, including PACI and AWS. Now this sector expects a double growth with an unchanged number of players - it is unlikely in two years there will be a new “Amazon”. Developing such systems is extremely long and costly, even with Amazon they appeared as a by-product.
Parallels had its groundwork in the direction of cloud services, but these were experimental projects, that is, the development itself was conducted on a residual basis. Any company makes money and produces products sold now. Going to develop such a large-scale project was a risky and brave step.
As they say in Parallels, Skolkovo grant allowed to decide on the development of PACI. Five million dollars allowed to hire people, form a large development team and attract resources so that the product could be born.
How much will it be in demand in the market?
Now such cloud services as, for example, My warehouse and Megaplan have their own clouds and just rent servers in data centers. But in terms of business efficiency, they do not need to develop and maintain their own clouds - their task is to ensure the quality of their service. Such a technical question as hosting in the cloud is more profitable to take in IaaS from the hosting company.
The hosting services market itself has recently been a fairly primitive business - companies kept their own data centers and rented a place in the server rack. It was not very convenient and rational, but simple. Then virtualization came - it assumed the possibility of chopping the server “into noodles”. Make one large enough many small ones and donate these virtual servers one at a time, thereby significantly improving one of the main indicators of the hosting business - profit from the rack. With the advent of virtualization, this figure has increased significantly.
King Cloud by Karen Ka Ying Wong
Despite the difficult name, IaaS is the same virtual server. But usually VPS are rented with strictly defined parameters: memory, processor, disk size, etc. The idea to change the parameters of VPS on the fly hung in the air, but it was difficult to implement from the point of view of process automation to the level of “Press the button - you will get the result”. Here everything was not so simple.
It took a kind of software solution that would disable the data center system administrators from the chain and allow the provider's client to communicate with the server directly and change the adjustments as he (the client) desires. Even strong development teams in the service provider staff need to spend at least 2-3 years of time and several million dollars in cash to create a fully automated solution. This is exactly what Parallels has done.
On the rake of wanting to make your own platform “with blackjack and everything else”, many service providers from Canada to Japan arrived, although it is clear that from the point of view of opportunities this task is not realizable for everyone. Because the hosting business profile is hosting, not software development. And the company needs to think not about the technical appearance of the platform for IaaS, but about the degree of customer satisfaction, the introduction of new services and other things.
Amazon quickly realized the opportunities before it. In addition, the company has long accumulated excess server capacity, which was used quite rarely to service bursts of consumer activity on Amazon.com, which traditionally happened on Thanksgiving Day, before Christmas and on the eve of several more holidays. The rest of the time, Amazon's data centers worked far from the limit, but at the same time they pulled money out of the pocket of an online retailer to maintain the efficiency of this server farm. The idea of ​​renting the “extra” infrastructure lay on the surface.
Amazon attracted developers who, after a while, made the software “bundle” to all existing servers, developed a billing system and invented a web interface to work with the infrastructure and called the whole Amazon Web Services farm. AWS gave the broadest freedom, but it was too tough for everyone. The infrastructure's “cloudiness” and its scalability (that scalability, one of the cornerstones of cloud services) could only be used by a very clever and system administrator.
Scalability is an undeniable advantage.
For many mortals, doing something with AWS was a feat. Although in the direction of the AWS closely watched small and medium businesses. The then innovation of the Amazonians looked very attractive - they were the first to offer hourly rates for hosting services. Normal hosting then (and now in most cases) is ordered for a month.
The wealth of opportunities and the flexible (but not so humane) pricing of Amazon Web Services attracts customers from Russia to the “cloud” of the Internet giant. Two years ago, a lively example of the “Risovaska” project was raging on Habré.
“Russian Amazon” in this connection would have been very useful three years ago, at the time of publication of the post about “Risovas'ka”. Even now, the prospect of using a foreign service, reading documentation in English and calling foreign support scares ordinary entrepreneurs - especially if their businesses are not targeted for IT. Our entrepreneurs have just learned not to be afraid of hosting and use e-mail on their own domain. For them, it would be good to get VPS with on-the-fly variable parameters on the principle of one window along with the usual hosting, Internet connection service, IP-telephony and other basic services.
But the main thing is that the hoster benefits from this approach. First, the new service prevents the outflow of advanced (read, cash) customers towards the same Amazon. Secondly, the hoster gets the opportunity to form interesting tariff plans on the basis of the new service - this is good from the point of view of marketing, provides customers with a new service. Thirdly, the very title of a cloud provider gives yesterday’s hosting provider at least +50 to karma due to its halo of advancement and exclusivity. Being a Mercedes in the world of hosting is, you know, well worth it.
In conclusion, work ungrateful. Let's try to predict the demand for PACI and the demand for services created and provided with it. First - general market things. The photo above shows the likely growth dynamics of the IaaS segment in the global cloud business. Parallels expects the rental market for virtualized infrastructure to roughly double in size to $ 27 billion. The IaaS segment will grow at the expense of small hosting providers — that is, at the expense of those companies for which Parallels is positioning its solution. In addition to PACI, its “boxing” should also be recorded - the platform is deployed and configured in a couple of weeks. And, of course, the predictability of work. Unlike artisanal counterparts created by hosters “for themselves, not for sale,” PACI was tested in different conditions, on different infrastructure and in different types of load.
For such software and services provided on it, the market is already ready. Profit from the use of scalable services (for which, in fact, is intended PACI) is obvious for businesses of different specializations. For example, a flower online store can prepare for a surge in traffic on the eve of March 8 with a couple of clicks in the site control panel, calmly withstand a flurry of requests from distraught customers, earn a three-month profit rate, and only pay for the hours when it was used "Extra" infrastructure. Or a startup that makes a successful online application and grows faster than its creators expected. Both the florist and the developer of cloud applications have one thing in common: with the help of PACI-based IaaS, they will not pay too much and will be more competitive than before.
Want to know what the conditions will be for you? Order a trial version on the site .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/139852/
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