Cloud hosting as it should be

In the spring of last year, we, the team performix.ru , were thinking about how best to manage the company's free resources. Our great interest, among other things, caused the sphere of cloud hosting services. The market research only fueled this interest: none of the tested solutions hit the jackpot of our preferences in terms of cost, convenience, reliability and functionality. We shrugged our shoulders, and, having estimated the financial side of the issue, we 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 - KVM-virtualization , software-controlled network and software storage system (DSS). The orchestration of all components is handled 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 these technological approaches to networking and data storage.
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The architectural innovations used in FLOPS allowed us to get rid of the main disease of any cloud hosting - high infrastructure cost, 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 give a number of new, peculiar only to the cloud, opportunities without a single penny of overpayment. In order to clarify, we will immediately make a reservation - we are talking about price parity with commercial VDS; Our tariffs should not be compared with the tariffs for non-host-containers without SLA or with the rates for dedicated “servers” collected from consumer hardware.

FLOPS public cloud features

Change server resources without rebooting

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

Data backup and high performance storage

The data storage system used by us provides for triple data backup. In addition to high storage reliability, you get a high-performance block device.

Instant Snapshots

The ability to create snapshots has long been a standard in desktop virtualization products, but is almost absent in solutions used in mass hosting.
The main purpose of snapshots is to back up data, that is, to instantly save the state of the hard disk of your server (for example, before updating the software or during a planned backup).

Monitoring Resource Consumption

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 schedules for each of the listed metrics are available in the user's personal account.
There are SMS-informing about important events - for example, about shutting down or restarting the server. In addition to ensuring accessibility, monitoring helps in solving other important tasks, for example, in estimating the load generated by your software, or in predicting the long-term costs of hosting, given the growth of your projects.

Free gigabit local network

Each client receives a private gigabit network for the organization of interconnect between virtual servers. Do you want to test any new trendy MapReduce and at the same time not get money for traffic or rent of physical servers? No problem, conduct tests with us.

Virtual machine cloning

As the name implies, the cloning operation creates a complete copy of an existing virtual machine, which differs from the original only in network settings.

Cloning allows you to deploy a cluster of arbitrary size in minutes.
Do you develop a complex distributed system and need the infrastructure of a dozen servers? FLOPS allows you to deploy the desired environment for the time your coffee is brewed.

Linux and Windows operating systems

One of our company's products requires a cluster for its work, which consists of Linux and Windows machines, and it was important for us to implement in our own cloud the full support of both operating systems.
At the moment we 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 expense forecasting

For many clients, the “floating” server value, characteristic of the clouds, is a new and unusual phenomenon, so we tried to ensure maximum transparency of the billing.
All debits from the personal account are made every minute. You always see the actual balance of the personal account and the forecast of monthly expenses based on the consumption of resources for the last 24 hours.

All the rest

Of course, in addition to the above, we offer all the features inherent in the clouds: resetting a forgotten password without rebooting the server, a 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 configuration of network limits, auto-tuning of resources, pluggable drives, domain registration, DNS hosting, S3 storage, load balancer, IPv6 and a number of other features. We would appreciate your thoughts on what services should be implemented first.

We hope that we managed to arouse your interest in the cloud and invite you to try 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 by sabzh, which we will do in one of the following posts.

We thank you for your attention!

UPD: In connection with habra effect, Windows operating systems are put longer than usual. Do not worry, this is normal.

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

UPD3: Windows Server 2008 is again available for installation.