Cloud hosting Slidebar. We will answer all!

Last Monday, June 28, a press conference was held for Parking.ru and Microsoft dedicated to the launch of the cloud service Slidebar . Behind the scenes, there are many questions that were asked by journalists later on the sidelines or were not asked at all, in this post I want to give a more detailed and detailed answer to them and express the point of view of Parking.ru company on the situation with the cloud hosting market in Russia .

The text is constructed as a question-answer, so that you can read the whole in pieces, and of course you can ask your questions in the comments. Most of the questions were taken from the blog of a famous journalist Andrei Kolesov, in the same place you can find materials on Cloud computing and discuss this topic (if you are not on Habré).

What is happening on the Russian hosting market?

There has been a certain lull in the Russian hosting market in recent years, since the widespread introduction of virtualization technologies of new services has practically not appeared.
Classic domain registration registration services and virtual hosting of sites have not brought profit for a long time, and many hosters are fighting in a dumping battle for customers. Over the past few years, many data centers have been commissioned in Moscow and St. Petersburg, which are not filled in the required amount.
Under these conditions, hosting providers are looking for ways to increase business profitability and recently they realized that the most promising development paths are to provide SaaS services to clients and cloud infrastructure services for rent, which are a natural development of the virtualization strategy.

How does it vary in size, geography, range of tasks, categories of customers?

With the advent of affordable broadband Internet access, including in the regions, the hosting market is growing in volume and becoming more mobile, now there is no strict reference to geography, we can safely offer our services to the regions.
Our company has expanded its line of tasks, if earlier the word “hosting” meant only site hosting, now this concept also includes SaaS, software rental and an elastic cloud infrastructure.
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How did the release of Hyper-V, and later R2, affect the business of Parking.ru?

Parking.ru has been working with Microsoft for a long time, providing VPS hosting services since the advent of Microsoft Virtual PC. But it was the release of the Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization system that made it possible to bring services to a qualitatively new level and offer our customers an inexpensive alternative to a physical dedicated server.
With the advent of Hyper-V R2 and the Microsoft Dynamic Data Center toolkit, it became possible to create a productive and fault-tolerant cluster solution, on the basis of which we launched the Slidebar service.

How much does Microsoft licensing policy allow you to implement such flexible tariff plans?

Microsoft has a special software licensing program for hosting providers - SPLA, in which providers offer a wide range of Microsoft software to customers on a rental basis. Usually, the cost of licenses depends on the number of users or processors, the client pays for licenses in accordance with the needs of his system.

Microsoft's flexible licensing policy and low monthly payments allowed us to include Windows Server licenses in the price of Slidebar. It is also worth noting that a number of solutions for hosters, such as Microsoft Dynamic Data Center, are provided to partners for free .

Why do you use only Microsoft tools and not others - VMware, Parallels? What do you think about the possibilities and prospects of Container technology?

There are several reasons why we use only Microsoft technologies.

The first is historical. For more than 10 years we have been providing our clients with hosting services on the Microsoft platform, our company has gained considerable expertise and experience over the years, which gives us a competitive advantage and allows us to provide comprehensive high-level services for business.

The second reason is the availability at the moment of the full range of Microsoft software required by the hosting provider for organizing and managing software and hardware infrastructure. These are Windows Server and System Center products, which are deeply integrated and fully compatible, which allows solving all tasks using standard methods, without the use of any tricks and third-party tools.

Finally, it should be noted that the Hyper-V virtualization platform itself is completely free.

Of course, going into the sector of virtualization and cloud computing, we studied competing platforms. For example, the solutions offered by VMware have their advantages and disadvantages compared to Hyper-V R2, but the high cost of licensing makes the use of VMware products justified, perhaps, only in the corporate segment.

When creating services on the VMware platform, oriented to the mass market, the high cost of licenses greatly affects the price for the end user, and this is not acceptable in such highly competitive markets as mass hosting.

Parallels also offers a number of virtualization solutions for the Parallels Virtuozzo Containers family; these solutions use the OS virtualization method (or containers). The technology has a number of limitations, both on configuring the virtual environment and on the range of software that can be installed on the server.

And since the basic OS tools run on the server in a single copy, it is practically impossible to ensure complete independence of the guest OS and a guaranteed minimum of resources.
Parallels Server 4 Bare Metal, which uses its own hypervisor, is currently inferior in functionality to both VMware and Hyper-V.

An important advantage of the Microsoft platform is the licensing program for service providers (SPLA) , covering almost the entire range of software required for hosting. While a similar licensing program from VMware does not apply to all products, and Parallels does not have such a program.

What innovations of Hyper-V allowed to implement Slidebar?

If we talk only about Hyper-V, then the following functions were critical for the implementation of SlideBar:
- Hyper-V cluster
- Cluster Shared Volume
- Live migration

In addition to Hyper-V itself, SlideBar uses a number of solutions that allowed us to create a service:
- A set of software for managing the virtual infrastructure of Microsoft System Center (SCOM, VMM, DPM);
- Microsoft Dynamic Data Center Toolkit for Hosters;
- Our own billing and provisioning system Parking Cube which provides a simple and flexible interface and service management. The system is deeply integrated with all elements of the infrastructure and allows you to manage both the entire cluster nodes and the parameters of a separate virtual machine.

Can the server configuration be changed dynamically and automatically?

The configuration of the Slidebar server can be changed dynamically with one disclaimer, in some cases a reboot will be required to apply the parameters. An automatic configuration change is possible by using the change planner or directly from the application running on the server, to call the functions of the Slidebar API.

It is often said that the main idea of ​​the cloud is that the consumer must operate not with the concepts of RAM or the number of processors, but with higher-level concepts, such as response time, etc. How is this organized with you?

Here you need to understand the terms, Slidebar is a service for renting a dynamic infrastructure like IaaS (for example, Amazon EC2), when people talk about this class of solutions, they usually operate on the size of the RAM, percent of the hard disk and other technical details.
Often, IaaS clouds are confused with PaaS or a platform as a service (for example, Microsoft Azure and Google App Engine), with respect to them they are operated by categories such as the number of ticks, the number of calls to the database, storage, etc. The main disadvantage of “platform clouds” (PaaS) is the need to develop applications specifically for them and, as a result, the inability to transfer the existing software without significant changes, as well as the incompatibility of the PaaS between different providers.

Using Slidebar, consumers operate with familiar concepts, such as a virtual machine with a Windows / Linux / FreeBSD operating system, RAM, processor power and size of a hard disk, which makes it easy to choose the desired configuration when outsourcing IT infrastructure.

What is the novelty? Is it possible for a user to change the parameters of a rented virtual server? Or the availability of a more flexible tariff plan with the possibility of almost hourly pay? Does anyone in Russia really have this kind of thing? I personally have heard about such proposals before?

The novelty of the service lies in the fact that it combines several technologies that were not previously used on the hosting market, namely the ability to change the parameters of a virtual server (including automatically) and billing with hourly rates.
The main difference from several declared cloud services “first in Russia” is that SlideBar is the first truly public service , with a simple and visual pricing system, the ability to order and start using the server within a few minutes in fully automatic mode.

At the recent CCC 2010, Cloud Conf ... etc. I heard a complaint about the highly inflated prices for hosting services in Russia, what can you say about your prices?

If you carefully analyze the tariffs for SlideBar, for different configurations, both hourly and monthly calculated (for comparison with competitors), it can be noted that they are lower than the average on the market, while offering much more opportunities for the customer than usual. And Parking.Ru tariffs on fixed virtual machine configurations are among the lowest in the Russian market.
If you compare with the offers of Western hosters, the cost of services in Russia is almost the same, and if you compare with Western “clouds”, for example, Amazon EC2 or RackSpace Cloud Servers, then Slidebar prices are either lower or comparable to them.

At the same time, it should be understood that there will always be dumping offers from some providers, both in Russia and abroad, who pay less attention to the quality of the service, to put it mildly.
The service includes not only hardware and software, but also maintenance work, software update, backup system, fault tolerance, round-the-clock technical support, as well as expenses for placing equipment in several data centers, providing Internet channels (and traffic for our customers is not limited!) and many other points that make the work of the entire system truly stable.
The cost of such services is significant and hosting providers who are engaged in hard dumping are likely to save on some points, be it the quality of the equipment or the level of service.