/ OpenStack

Visitors and customers demand new features and often want them to be available quickly. Therefore, you want to focus your business and application and especially not on the underlying infrastructure. This should just work and always be available.

Quickly introduce a development street, optimize an acceptance environment or simply start a server to test new software. With our OpenStack platform you can easily accomplish this while maintaining your standards. You can upload OpenStack images that are fully prepared according to your requirements, and quickly launch new instances. Or create a clone from an existing instance to test that new code or update before it is put into production.

Simplicity, flexibility and reproducibility can all be accomplished with our OpenStack environment. You can set this up manually via the Horizon dashboard or fully automate it through the OpenStack API. You can set it up manually or use Terraform, for example, to speed it up and simplify it.

An open platform means that you can easily migrate to and away from it. That's not the case with most public clouds, but it is with CloudVPS OpenStack. Our environment is based on pure OpenStack code. Code that works with us as well as with other providers offering OpenStack. This makes it easy to move to CloudVPS, but also away.

If you serve a global market and it is necessary to offer your application in other parts of the world, you can easily duplicate your application environment to another OpenStack provider near your visitors.

OpenStack makes a software defined data center possible. Its hardware and design largely determine performance, redundancy and stability. That's why we chose Dell EMC hardware at all levels of our OpenStack infrastructure. We use Dell EMC PowerEdge servers for both compute and storage nodes and high performance Dell EMC Networking provides connectivity.

We have built redundancy in all aspects of our infrastructure to ensure the reliability of the platform and accommodated them in three state-of-the-art data centers in the Netherlands, including Equinix . Each data center is fully self-sufficient and available as an availability zone in our platform, the network is separated between different paths and all network components are duplicated in each data center. Between the data centers, we have very high connectivity with a huge capacity of Internet connectivity (120 Gbps). The traffic between data centers and from and to the internet is free, based on a fair use policy.

Each data center contains multiple compute nodes, which are internally redundant, with overcapacity present to accommodate failure of some nodes with minimal downtime. We also opted for a software solution for our storage capacity. This automatically ensures that there are always three copies of your data available in three different racks.

Application environments were traditionally designed for peak loads. This meant that there was a huge overcapacity at regular times. With the advent of cloud technology, software and tooling is available to set up application environments to grow with the required capacity without having to purchase resources in advance. When more capacity is required, you can scale it up and back down when less capacity is required. You only pay for what you use, also when using our OpenStack platform.

From within the OpenStack infrastructure, you can enable resource on-demand, quickly add new instances, and expand resource capabilities of existing ones.  By using images, you can prepare a complete instance, including all necessary software configurations and the application, to boot immediately. Expanding server capacity can be performed at any time, choosing from many available flavors.

It is desirable to automatically capture this scalability and initiate it from the application. Our OpenStack platform provides this with an OpenStack API that allows you to control all of the infrastructure features. Should your application not be suitable for this, or do you want to know how to optimize your current application in order to make use of all OpenStack features? We are happy to assist you.

Container technology is being used more and more. On the one hand because of the benefits it offers, and on the other hand because it is becoming increasingly easier to build a good container architecture. Containers increase the predictability of application behavior and may shorten release cycles. This results in a faster, more stable and automated release of new versions of your applications.

Orchestration tooling like Kubernetes and Docker Swarm also increases in popularity. This tooling makes it easier to set up applications redundantly and scalable. And from this tooling, the underlying infrastructures are prepared and configured. Our OpenStack platform is very suitable for this, because all OpenStack features can be controlled via the OpenStack API.

We offer CoreOS as the default image on our OpenStack platform. If you want to use another container-optimized operating system, you can upload and use your own image. Through OpenStack Heat, a feature that we offer on our OpenStack platform, you can easily configure a Kubernetes or Docker Swarm cluster because the OpenStack Heat templates are publicly available and many distros deliver images that are quick and easy to use in OpenStack. Terraform can also cope with our OpenStack API, if you use this tool.