How to choose a direction for the development of an IT project: 1cloud experience
In our blog on Habré, we told you how the creation of a virtual IT infrastructure provider 1cloud began . Today we will continue to talk about how we are developing the project and that in this regard we can prompt the teams that are just starting their way in business.
On the one hand, choosing a direction for further development means that the project is doing well - it has room to grow. On the other hand, the number of these very directions may be too large. Or vice versa, the company can see only one possible path at a time, in fact there are several of them. Below we will tell you about the ways of improving 1cloud that we have chosen, and how this can be useful for other projects.
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Where to develop: "around" IaaS
In the last part of the story, we talked about the fact that our ideas about potential customers and their tasks have changed dramatically since the launch of the service. In this regard, we decided to continue studying the portrait of our consumer in order to better understand how to help him solve his problems most effectively.
At first, we determined that the majority of our clients are not individuals, but legal entities, which, in addition to direct services of an IaaS provider, need appropriate registration of expenses for these works as part of accounting. Then we decided to continue exploring the needs of this category in order to understand what other services might be in demand for them. And in the end, we came to the understanding that a number of our corporate clients might be interested in the possibility of creating private networks.
There are a number of reasons why creating a private network is useful for business. Here and security issues (not all traffic can be “driven” through the public Internet, plus not all servers, access is granted there in principle), and an increase in operation speed (usually, the public connection speed varies from 10 to 100 Mbit / s, the width of the private channel we have a network of 10 Gbit / s), and an increase in the efficiency of applications. As a result, now in the 1cloud control panel interface there is the possibility of organizing a private virtual network (one or several) and including client servers in it.
Creating a private network through the 1cloud control panel
Another challenge we paid attention to was the issue of improving the quality of integrating client applications with our cloud and facilitating interaction with our infrastructure for clients. In order for customers to have the ability to manage their servers from third-party applications, we implemented the REST API.
For us in this case it was especially important that the API-interface can be useful both to private users who do not want to deal with complex technologies, and large customers and partners who are planning to create their own services based on the infrastructure of the provider. So we helped to make the service more convenient for a whole group of users, among which are resellers of our services, partner companies, and application developers (they are helped by the API to automatically scale the hosting infrastructure).
Conclusion: if you study the direction of development of your own product or service, pay attention to those that will allow you to cover the needs of as many customer categories as possible. None of these functions can probably be called a “silver bullet”, but so you can be sure that your efforts will not be wasted, even if these are services that are not “paramount” in relation to your product in the case of automation of accounting tasks).
Moreover, you should pay special attention to such non-core additions, if right now a large-scale redesign of the functional or its radical improvement (in terms of your main area of ​​work) is difficult or impossible. Instead of trying to slightly improve any of the main functionalities (simply because, as you think, the time has come for a change), pay attention to the possibilities that will make everything more comfortable that surrounds your main project.
Changes on the fly
Cloud infrastructure is popular because of its flexibility - that is why at some point we decided to take up the “strengthening of the strengths” of our service: if we have defaults in creating in-house infrastructure, we should make them even more obvious. And since we are a provider of IaaS & PaaS solutions, in our case, this “amplifier” was the concept of changing the parameters of the cloud infrastructure or the technology stack used on the fly, right along with the service.
High performance
Of course, APIs and private networks are not the only things corporate clients may need. Very often, companies that are at the stage of rapid growth resort to cloud infrastructure services: for example, the number of product users is growing so fast that the company's technological stack simply cannot cover its needs. In such cases, the company needs not just "some" infrastructure, but high-performance or simply "large" servers (machines with up to 32 CPUs and up to 128 GB of RAM per server).
Naturally, not all companies provide for such a development scenario from the very beginning - so we did not just realize the opportunity used by high-performance servers, but also decided to develop a mechanism that allows customers to migrate their infrastructure to a more productive pool in the course of work. And this just refers to the “strengthening of strengths” - the provision of a service that fully corresponds to the concept of cloud work.
Disk space and disk types
The same principle lay in our decision to provide users with different types of disks for different tasks. This approach can be justified when creating multi-tier storage systems - data that is often used by applications can be placed on faster drives, such as SSDs, and for storing online backups, you can connect a slower, but cheaper and larger SATA to the server. disk.
Such use of various types of disks allows you to make the overall infrastructure solution more flexible, efficient and cost-optimized - and these are precisely the characteristics of cloud services that we really needed not to lose sight of when developing new functionality.
Exactly the same requirements are met by our solution to provide users with the ability to manage disk space on the fly - so they can order additional disks for their virtual servers without stopping them. And since this is also a strong point for us, we decided to spend additional time and effort to eliminate the difficulties that had previously accompanied this process for the user (a more detailed account of this here ).
Administration panel for server disk space in 1cloud service
Conclusion: your service, direction of work or product probably have strengths “by default” - that is why you work in the chosen field. It is important that the efforts to improve do not bypass this direction as well - so you can do just strengths a real advantage not only, as they say, by design (in comparison with less promising technological concepts), but also in relation to other players in your market. .
Tasks to facilitate the work of non-specialists
To facilitate the work with the service for non-specialists - both corporate customers and individuals - is another good direction for the development of the project. We in this area decided to introduce several innovations at once.
Virtual Server Templates
Setting up a server is a non-trivial task for a non-specialist, so we decided to make it easier for clients to work with the hosting infrastructure and speed up the process of its scaling by giving them the ability to save templates of already configured virtual servers.
Preset hosting control panel
Among users who buy VDS hosting with a preinstalled control panel are also many customers who are not ready to dive deep into the IT topic: these are site owners (personal pages, hobby resources, small business projects, etc.), resellers hosting services, web studios and agencies that need to “host” client sites somewhere.
All these users, both private and corporate, it is important to quickly deploy the site, without plunging into technical problems. And this means that in order to provide the necessary level of convenience and speed, you need to save users from having to install, configure extra software, and also monitor its operation and the relevance of licenses.
To do this, we have implemented the server order function for organizing our own hosting with a preinstalled control panel. In this case, the server is configured in a special constructor, which in real time shows the change in its cost depending on the choice of parameters.
Additional licensing
Another headache that hosting users face is the administration of leased licenses for the programs they use. To make it easier to track information about which licenses are activated for a specific server, as well as data on their value, there is a special page in the 1cloud system. With it, users can also easily add licenses or extend existing ones.
1cloud service page on license backorder
Conclusion: at first glance it seems that making the service not only functional, but also convenient for a person who is far from a deep understanding of your topic, is quite difficult. In fact, of course, very much in solving this problem depends not only on the technological capabilities of the product, but on its usability .
As for the decisions themselves, they can be implemented fairly simply and not require an excessively large amount of time from your employees. This is exactly what happened in the case of your described functionality - clearly defining for ourselves what we want to change and how to achieve it, we implemented it fairly quickly and without any problems.
findings
- If you are looking for the direction of development of your service and product, but you are not ready for a radical restructuring of the system or impressive changes (or you think that they are not needed, but you feel that small improvements cannot be avoided), pay attention to the “supporting” the functions of your product: how convenient it is to pay for your services, what documents should accompany this process, what “close in spirit” refinements will be gratefully accepted by your customers. Of course, without careful study of your users here (as in other situations) will not do - but everyone knows this by default.
- Do not forget your strengths: perhaps they need improvement, after all, it is around these decisions that your product is built. In our case, the direction for development is prompted by the very concept of the cloud service - we are trying to make it exactly the way it should be.
- Work with non-professionals: a difficult, but gratifying direction of development. Even if your audience of clients is made up predominantly of other companies, this does not mean that their staff will necessarily have specialists who have the time and knowledge to deal with the work of your product. Most likely, even those who could do everything “do it yourself” will thank you for automating certain services and providing easier to use solutions - after all, this is why companies or people turn to you: what you doing for them is not their main job.
PS A little more about how we improve the work of the virtual infrastructure provider 1cloud :
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/282984/
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