Who can be called a cloud provider or how not to fall for hoster tricks?

Introduction

In the IT outsourcing market, there is a mass of services ranging from the placement of physical equipment in an external data center of a provider, its technical support and administration, to the rental of computing resources (servers, disks, networks).

Many people mistakenly call renting computing resources cloud computing. This is not entirely true. The market for the rental of computing resources is highly fragmented, not all providers can be called cloud. Moreover, most of the providers, who call themselves cloud-based, are ordinary hosters, who have been hosting websites all their life.
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So let's see who is who!

Cloud provider vs hosters

Virtualization

Both cloud providers and hosters use server virtualization technologies. These are rather old technologies, many of them are more than 10 years old.

Fortunately, the dedicated dedicated dedicated servers have not started hosting cloud servers yet. Although not surprised and this)

From now on, I will begin to list the key differences. Earlier, we found out that both cloud providers and hosters use server virtualization technologies. But in nature there are other virtualization technologies.

First, it is storage virtualization. Its use allows you to combine a large number of physical storage systems into a single logical pool. In other words, the zoo of storage systems can be combined into a single unit, visible from the outside, for example, as 300TB disk capacity. With this approach, disk fragments of the same virtual server can be stored on different storage systems of the provider.

The second is network virtualization. The technology of network virtualization allows you to move away from the use of standard functionality of network equipment, namely, the use of VLANs. After all, the maximum possible number of VLANs on physical equipment is limited to 4096 units. And if you want to become a large cloud provider, you will definitely exhaust this limit. Network virtualization software in turn allows you to run an unlimited number of isolated networks and makes it possible to scale the cloud almost infinitely.

In addition, the use of network virtualization software allows you to attach a smaller value to the composition of physical network equipment and its manufacturers. Allows to abstract from iron that does cloud provider more flexible and not adhered to technologies of specific vendors.

The use of storage virtualization software and networks is not a requirement for a cloud provider, but indicates its maturity and desire to become a technology leader.

In particular, CROC used all three types of virtualization as part of its cloud platform (CROC Virtual Data Center):

• Server Virtualization - Red Hat KVM
• Storage Virtualization - IBM GPFS Clustered Parallel File System
• Network virtualization is a commercial product based on the Openflow protocol. The name of the product has not been disclosed in order to increase the technological gap from competitors.

Service Management
The second factor when comparing cloud providers and hosters is a way to manage services.
How do hosters work? Most often there is a colorful website with plenty of sliders and switches. On the website, you can calculate the cost of the server with disks, find out the cost of renting the OS, add ip-addresses, specify the requirements for the communication channel and click the “Buy” button. The site is a “beautiful wrapper” for the sale of a dedicated virtual server. After purchase, the client receives a server with a pre-installed OS, disk space and network settings. Changing the power of the machine, disk capacity, network settings is made only on request to the provider.
At the same time, the cloud provider operates on the principle of full self-service, “Self service”. This means that, ideally, an account is created for the client to the self-service portal, through which you can:

• Enable, disable, change the power of virtual servers
• Add disk resources
• Change the performance of the disk subsystem by migrating disks, for example, from SATA to speakers
• Assign external static IP addresses to the server
• Manage internal addressing and routing
• Manage backup
• Manage machine templates
• Configure IPsec VPN tunnels to your site, including using already installed locally physical network equipment, etc.
• Etc.

The principle of self-service can significantly increase the flexibility of the service, as well as be independent of the technical support service provider. In a word - it is convenient.

The self-service portal of CROC Virtual Data Center allows you to independently manage all the above services. New customers, gaining access to the portal in the first days, ask clarifying questions on the use of the service, and then, as a rule, go on a fully independent voyage across the expanses of the CROC Virtual Data Center.

From experience, I can say that after a month of using the service, customer calls to the technical support service practically cease, and the number of running servers and disks grow.

Billing

The third factor when comparing cloud providers and hosters is the way of accounting services (billing).
Hosters, as a rule, provide services on a monthly basis. If the composition of services has been adjusted within a month, then the granularity of their accounting is reduced to full days. Accounting services performed in manual mode.

Cloud providers approach accounting significantly more flexible. The accounting granularity is seconds-hours. Accounting is automated and does not require human participation. Automated billing keeps track of all changes made by the user through the self-service portal.
CROC's virtual data center uses per-second billing. In addition, it is possible to download detailed reports for the period with breakdown up to each transaction. A similar service is provided by cellular operators, though for an additional fee.

So, we compared the approaches used by cloud providers and hosters. We found out that the key difference between them is the presence of a full-featured self-service portal and billing. The use of server virtualization is present in both cases, but not all cloud providers have virtualization of data storage systems and networks.

In the next post we will look into the difficult question of choosing a cloud provider. After all, the cloud service market is extremely “heterogeneous”. The situation is complicated by the aggressive marketing of many companies, but you realize that if someone shouts the loudest on the market, it’s far from the fact that his product is the best. It often happens the other way around).

And yes, I am ready to answer any questions about the cost of accommodation, technology and other information in the mail MBerezin@croc.ru