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 a long time: the beta testing of the new service has ended, and we are launching it into commercial operation. In this article, we will talk in detail about the options for using the new cloud, as well as on the tariffs for which its use will be paid.

Why it is needed: usage scenarios

As noted in the previous publication, the Virtual Private Cloud service will be of particular interest to corporate clients. With the help of our service they will be able to get the following benefits:

• A significant reduction in the cost of "iron". On the basis of leased cloud resources, you can deploy hundreds of projects, and this will be much cheaper compared to using real hardware: there will be no need to acquire expensive equipment and attract additional staff to maintain it.
• Easy cost planning. The leasing of cloud computing resources is priced in a flexible and transparent way, which allows you to accurately calculate costs and predict the savings that VPC use gives.
• The rate 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, you can, for example, easily deploy your IT infrastructure for a new office. With scaling, there will also be no serious problems: in case of need, you can always simply purchase new resources.

Let us consider in more detail the most common scenarios for using a virtual private cloud for corporate purposes.
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Building a separate infrastructure for different departments / projects

In any organization, as a rule, there are several departments or projects that are not related to each other. When using a public cloud, in such a case, it is necessary either to tie the infrastructure to a single account (which is very doubtful from a security point of view), or to register multiple accounts, which also causes many inconveniences.

Virtual private cloud allows you to avoid all the problems described: for each department of the organization 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 well-defined virtual machines that host well-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 without the possibility of buying resources.

Migrate existing infrastructure to the cloud

Many organizations have to deal with the situation when supporting their own virtualized infrastructure starts to cost too much: it requires the organization of redundant power supply and Internet connection, the involvement of additional specialists, the purchase of equipment and the replacement of faulty components ... into the cloud. But this is often difficult: all software has to be reinstalled from scratch. An additional complication lies in the fact that cloud service providers often impose a lot of restrictions, which makes it necessary to make significant changes to the architecture.

Especially for corporate clients wishing to transfer their own infrastructure to us, we have adopted a number of measures that facilitate migration:

• Our cloud provides the ability to import ready-made images of virtual machines (all common formats are supported);
• network topology in our VPC can be configured arbitrarily; if you and a public network used a local network (or even several local networks), all this can be easily implemented with us;
• The virtualization system we use allows you to run virtual machines running any operating systems — if you suddenly need, for example, Solaris or FreeBSD, you can install them without any problems.

SaaS for customers

Some companies for one reason or another do not transfer their own infrastructure to the cloud, but at the same time they would not mind organizing the provision of cloud resources for contractors and clients. Our new cloud is well suited for this use case: you can create virtual workplaces and organize access to corporate information resources from anywhere in the world.

Work with peak loads

In any organization, there are seasonal peaks, during which the IT infrastructure is under the greatest burden (in financial institutions these can be periods of preparing and submitting reports, in commercial enterprises - the pre-New Year period, etc.). During such periods, additional IT resources may be required, but acquiring additional hardware and software for two or three weeks a year is hardly justified. It is much easier and cheaper to rent virtual resources, which are also easily scaled.

Running in new projects

It often happens that the organization launches a new project and it is not clear how much it will consume resources. Of course, buying expensive iron for running a new project is irrational. But it is also unsafe to conduct experiments on the basis of the existing infrastructure: there is always the risk of an unexpected sharp increase in loads.

In such a situation, renting cloud computing resources may be the best solution. On the basis of VPC, you can create an experimental platform for load testing and running in a new project.

According to the results of running the project in the cloud, you can estimate 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, the probability of errors in the final version will be significantly reduced.
On the basis of 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 necessary environment for testing and give each team access to their 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 rate. With the help of 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, it can be not restored, but simply deployed a new one based on the 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 the VPC, it is also possible to organize general access to the product both for the members of the development team and for the users - this will help speed up the process of finding and correcting errors.

Reselling

The “Virtual Private Cloud” service opens up broad opportunities for novice Internet entrepreneurs: web studios, virtual hosting providers, game services and others. You can build your own projects based on the resources leased from us, 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 customers will not know that their virtual machines are running on the basis of our infrastructure.

Billing

General principles

Using the Virtual Private Cloud service, you pay for the amount of resources at your disposal. After resources are reserved, payment for them is removed from the balance every hour. It will be charged regardless of whether resources are used or not. When calculating the payment takes into account the maximum rate of each resource per hour. If, for example, within an hour you change project quotas several times, the calculation will be calculated on the basis of maximum values.

In the control panel of each project there is a button “Optimize quotas” - by clicking on it, you can bring the project quotas in line with the resources consumed. Because of 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% load. To avoid an unexpected lack of resources, the required amount of CPU 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 reserved in full when creating virtual machines.

Discs

In the cloud, you can rent two types of discs: basic and fast.
The performance base disk corresponds to an enterprise-class SATA disk. It is suitable for use in projects for which work does not require frequent reading and writing information.

Fast Disk is a solution based on SSD-drives. The response time and speed are improved compared to the basic disk several times.

Image Store

We have already mentioned above 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 pattern as the base disk usage.

Floating IPs

We already told about floating IP-addresses in the previous publication: inside a virtual machine, all ports listen to a private (“gray”) address, and outside the machine is available at a public (“white”) address. This technology is well suited for lightly loaded 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 to be more reliable. At the start, we provide subnets of five addresses.

Windows licenses

If you plan to create in the cloud virtual machines running Windows OC, you do not need to purchase a license separately: we provide it for rent. The rent includes regular updates. Windows license fees are charged at a fixed rate every hour.

Network traffic

For each account, three terabytes of external traffic are provided free of charge every month. According to preliminary calculations, this should be enough for most small and medium-sized projects.

As soon as the established limit is exceeded, funds will be deducted every hour to pay for traffic — both incoming and outgoing.

To optimize costs, traffic can be purchased in advance at preferential rates. This offer should first of all interest 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 how long the funds available on the balance sheet should suffice. This will help you avoid unexpected shutdown of all servers due to lack of funds in the balance.

Conclusion

So, the new service is launched - join and use. We are waiting for your questions, comments and suggestions for its further development and improvement.

Naturally, we are not going to linger at the current level for a long time. We have big plans for the development of VPC. In particular, in the near future many additional services will appear: new types of disks (even faster than those offered now), rental of load balancers and much more.

We also plan to continue the cycle of publications on VPC issues in our blog. Follow the news!

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