VPS and Beyond:
Why IaaS WIll SolVe
ProBlemS Beyond VPS
Introduction 3
Part 2 – Why IaaS will Solve
Problems Beyond VPS
4
IaaS Benefits for You and
Your Customer
6
Capabilities Required to
Launch a True Cloud IaaS
6
About Us
9
Summary 9
IntrodUctIon
A large proportion of the service provider market
has not yet developed a true cloud offering.
These organisations remain at the virtualised level with virtual private servers (VPS) masquerading as cloud services. As a result, these service providers are not in a position to benefit internally from the efficiency savings of a cloud platform or to deliver the value of true cloud services to their customers. Part of this problem is that many do not realise or recognise the difference between VPS and cloud and therefore do not understand the benefits or uses possible with IaaS.
As part of a three part series, ALVeA Services aims to clearly demonstrate a journey service providers can take as they move from VPS to cloud services.
Part 1:
VPS versus Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): The definitions, differences and market opportunity
Part 2:
Why IaaS: how IaaS can solve service providers’ and customers’ VPS problems and the capabilities necessary to reap these benefits
Part 3:
Transitioning from VPS services to IaaS: Why IaaS is the starting point from which to grow PaaS and SaaS services and a roadmap for delivery
Part 1 – recap:
In part one, VPS and Beyond: Why moving to an IaaS offering will Pay dividends, we outlined the definitions, differences and market opportunities of VPS and IaaS. In brief summarisation:
Market Sizing – Whereas VPS market sizing is no longer relevant, IaaS presents a huge market opportunity under watch by many analyst firms. Gartner released figures early in 2013 that show the public cloud services market is forecasted to grow 18.5 percent in 2013 to total $131 billion worldwide, up from $111 billion in 2012. IaaS continued as the fastest growing segment of the market, growing 42.4 percent in 2012 to $6.1 billion and expected to grow 47.3 percent in 2013 to $9 billion1.
Part 2 – Why IaaS WIll SolVe
ProBlemS Beyond VPS
In this paper, we address the problems IaaS is solving beyond VPS and what this
means for the service provider by showcasing five areas where IaaS is better equipped
to meet the requirements of a cloud service provider’s customers and business.
Finally, websites that are media or sports related frequently have wide ranging requirements for resource usage based upon events. These can sometimes be planned well in advance (TV broadcasts, football matches etc), but sometimes cannot be predicted by more than a few hours (player transfers for example).
In each of these three examples, a traditional VPS/ virtualised server type solution would not be able to easily adapt to these changes whereas an IaaS platform is capable of supporting this varying provisioning and de-provisioning service.
2: Load Testing/Performance
In the previous example, we mentioned a number of uses where companies can expect to have variable demand based upon events. having an IaaS platform does not magically fix that, although it does remove a crucial hurdle. The other key element is testing to make sure the website or application itself can scale to meet those demands. Without having an IaaS platform to scale easily to test the effects on a particular service, companies will not be able to predict where bottlenecks may occur. IaaS solves exactly this problem by enabling a rapid resolution cycle on testing to detect or anticipate future bottlenecks. Additionally, IaaS is a useful way of automatically
generating ‘real’ user load on services to allow each to be fully tested end–to-end.
All of the examples listed in the previous section could benefit from real user load testing. Quite clearly traditional VPS solutions do not have the flexibility or agility that is required of a service provider to meet load or performance testing.
outlined within are the benefits both you and your customer will receive and the capabilities required to offer a true cloud IaaS.
1: Fluctuating Demand
It isn’t unusual for VPS providers to take anywhere from 15 minutes to four hours to provision infrastructure, whereas IaaS providers typically provision between 15 seconds and three minutes. You might imagine this would be a clear and easy differentiator for the IaaS provider; however, the real difference is in the ‘de-provisioning’ of the service as well. Typically, VPS providers operate on a minimum of a monthly contract, so speed of provisioning is somewhat irrelevant as the service itself is not flexible. Alternatively, IaaS platforms are capable of being used by the hour or day dependant on requirements.
For example, when an online retailer has increased demand in the run up to Christmas, it can easily add capacity every day or even every hour as the customer load increases. The week before Christmas, load might drop sharply with a peak again after for the post Christmas sales.
3: Dev/Test
expanding further on the concept of using IaaS for testing and development, having the ability to easily spin up and down, clone and template existing and new configurations of applications and sites can be highly useful. This enables users to obtain rapid results on business issues and risks rather than having significantly extended test cycles due to provisioning delays.
examples of these include upgrade testing, staged rollouts of software, performance optimisation and even end user split testing. By being able to consume the underlying infrastructure as a service, organisations can iterate quickly and easily without the underlying infrastructure becoming a key bottleneck.
Some service providers may look at the revenue models from all of the potential uses around testing, be it functionality, software or load and consider it not worthy to offer as services. The key reason they should, however, is that testing enables end users to gain confidence and knowledge in their platforms, encouraging them to bring their real production workloads onboard. A cloud service provider really wants this type of revenue.
4: Batch Processing/High Performance
Computing
By being able to easily switch infrastructure from one workload to another through rapid provisioning and de-provisioning, it becomes possible to enable large amounts of compute resources to be freed between users to allow for high performance computing (hPC) or large-scale batch jobs to run.
For example, if you ran a cloud platform specialising in providing hPC and batch processes, you could easily have customers sharing the same large-scale infrastructure at different times of the day. Financial firms might use the infrastructure for large scale processing overnight outside of working hours to be ready for the markets opening the next day, and when they were not using it, a pharmaceutical company could be using it for chemical modelling or similar. In doing so, both organisations can take advantage of greater computer power in a more cost-effective way than they could do internally. A VPS provider does not, in most cases, support this capability.
5: Risk Reduction & Agility
IaaS addresses all of the mentioned uses where the ability to scale to meet customer demands with agility and flexibility is essential. IaaS can be dramatically different from typical VPS usage, and the biggest reason for that is the flexibility offered by IaaS around provisioning of resources. Additional benefits to both the cloud service provider and its customers include:
• Rapid scalability and flexibility to cope with changing business requirements
• A more cost-effective solution compared to traditional siloed infrastructure for both the customer and provider
• metered consumption, on demand
• The ability to provision resources at scale
• Single management system improving efficiency
• multi-tenancy leading to higher usage ratios and margins
• Workload abstraction from hardware to increase resiliency
• elasticity to rapidly provision and deprovision
• Increased SLA capabilities
caPaBIlItIeS reqUIred to
laUnch a trUe cloUd IaaS
VPS providers must realise that the benefits of IaaS far outweigh their current
capabilities. To deliver a true cloud IaaS requires the following capabilities:
IaaS BenefItS for yoU
and yoUr cUStomer
The usage that IaaS enables can be dramatically different from typical VPS usage, and the
biggest reason for that is the flexibility offered by IaaS around provisioning of resources.
Pricing Fine grain metering per hour/day/month/year. Flexible packages and configurations Flexibility Flexible provisioning of resources and configurations
Provisioning Time near instant provisioning time scale Deprovisioning Can scale up and down
API Access Fully functional public API
Self-Service Full self-service capabilities – provisioning and managing virtual resources including disks, firewalls, networks etc.
OS Availability Support for all common operating systems Migration Ability to import existing images and applications
Application Aware Understanding of applications and workloads rather than Vms
Integrations easily integratable into existing internal and external management tools
one of the key ingredients to provide a cloud management solution to support the requirements of not only the business, but also the customer. These requirements include the capability to:
Deploy quickly to reduce the time to market
This is of pivotal importance as cloud service providers all try to capture the $30 billion market opportunity quickly. This will enable customers to buy cloud services in the shortest possible time. Service providers and hosting companies excel at providing services, not building software. They need a solution to get to market quickly and easily.
Manage resources
Using a cloud management solution that allows you to view, filter, organise and manage your resources, be they physical or virtual, in a manner that suits you and your business will help you achieve greater efficiencies and responsiveness.
Automate common repetitive tasks
to free up time
The cloud management solution should reduce the operations staff’s time spent on repetitive activities that add little value to your service quality. Automating these repetitive tasks frees up highly skilled staff to concentrate on higher margin activities and deal pro-actively with more complex issues. The benefit is improved margins for the business.
Scale, reliably
Confidently know that your cloud management solution can grow with your IaaS platform as customer numbers and usage increases.
Deliver application solutions quickly
and easily
Seek the capability to easily create, manage and deploy sophisticated application templates.
Offer flexible and differentiated billing
and metering solutions
As you expand with an IaaS offering, look for a management platform that has a full-featured, integrated billing system to provide a complete solution depending on a companies existing capabilities up to and including measurement, rating, invoice line generation, invoice generation and credit card collection facilities if required.
Provide a highly customisable user interface
Select a cloud management platform that includes a highly customisable user interface. every business and customer is different and has different skill levels, so allowing each to dynamically reconfigure and customise the user interface to suit their requirements is important.
Offer role-based access control
ensure the solution allows access control to enable your end users to scale their usage. By supporting multiple users and groups within each customer account, you can allow different groups of users’ access to different sets of resources securely.
Deliver a single pane of glass view
Ensure intelligent workload placement
Workload placement should be intelligent and application aware. This includes being able to ensure workloads are placed near to or far from, other workloads or particular groups of computer nodes for resiliency or performance reasons.
Easily integrate and extend the solution
As an IaaS offering expands, having comprehensive user and administrative APIs allow the licensee to integrate it with existing systems and extend its functionality where appropriate.
Offer heterogeneous support
aBoUt US
This white paper is brought to you by ALVeA Services and Flexiant. ALVeA Services
selected Flexiant’s cloud orchestration software for its ALVeA Infrastructure
Service. Flexiant provides ALVeA Infrastructure with an on-demand, fully
automated cloud services provisioning solution which includes comprehensive
billing, white-labelling and a single pane of glass infrastructure control.
ALVEA Services
ALVeA Services offers a suite of cloud and managed solutions across security, infrastructure and resilience. Available exclusively via the channel and delivered through one easy-to-use platform, the ALVeA range offers its partners a one-stop shop for a multitude of services. ALVeA Security, ALVeA Infrastructure and ALVeA Resilience & Continuity currently offer eight distinct services across the portfolio: managed network Security, Cloud Based Infrastructure, managed Content & Application delivery, Cloud Attached Storage, Satellite Broadband, dnS, Authentication & Anti-Virus. The ALVeA brand is an independent services offering for the channel backed,managed, and supported by technical expertise and infrastructure from ComPUTeRLInKS. The suite will continue to be developed by ComPUTeRLInKS to enable its partners to provide expertly delivered services to their customers.
www.alvea-services.com
ALVEA Infrastructure
ALVeA Infrastructure offers virtualised on-demand servers, designed to behave just like physical servers. Via the easy-to-use web control panel, enterprise class cloud infrastructure can be deployed in minutes - including the ability to provision cloud system, servers, and networks and then to only pay for what is used, whilst at the same
time being assured that data is secure and always accessible. designed to bring the full benefits of secure IT on demand to organisations of any size, ALVeA’s cloud architecture gives access to IT infrastructure resource when it’s needed, without all the expense and fuss associated with traditional solutions. once finished, it’s simply turned off until the next time it’s needed.
Flexiant
Flexiant is a leading international provider of cloud orchestration software for on-demand, fully automated provisioning of cloud services. headquartered in europe, Flexiant’s software gives cloud service providers’ business agility, freedom and flexibility to scale, deploy and
configure cloud services, simply and cost-effectively. Vendor agnostic and supporting multiple hypervisors, Flexiant Cloud orchestrator is a software suite that is service provider ready, enabling cloud service provisioning through to granular metering, billing and reseller
management. Used by over one hundred organisations worldwide, from small hosters to large managed Service Providers (mSPs) and enterprises, Flexiant Cloud orchestrator is simple to understand, simple to deploy and simple to use. Flexiant customers include Cartika, FP7 Consortium, IS Group, ITeX, and netGroup.
www.flexiant.com
ThIS WhITe PAPeR IS FoR InFoRmATIonAL PURPoSeS onLY And mAY ConTAIn TYPoGRAPhICAL eRRoRS And TeChnICAL InACCURACIeS. The ConTenT IS PRoVIded AS IS, WIThoUT eXPReSS oR ImPLIed WARRAnTIeS oF AnY KInd.
© ComPUTeRLInKS UK LTd
contact alVea
