Cloud Frequently Asked Questions

There are many definitions of cloud computing and indeed, the phrase means many different things to many different people. In 2009, McKinsey & Company provided a definition of cloud computing that we felt was the best definition yet:

Definition: Clouds are hardware-based services offering compute, network and storage capacity where:

• Hardware management is highly abstracted from the buyer
• Buyers incur infrastructure costs as variable OPEX
• Infrastructure capacity is highly elastic (up or down)

Based on the definition above, we feel that in order to be 'true' cloud computing, the service needs to:

• Allow the user to self-provision a server any time, via a web console or via an API.
• Allow the user to change the resources on their server any time, again via web interface or API - for example, add or remove memory or CPU power.
• Allow the user to provision more or less storage any at time via a web console or API.
• Only charge the user on a very granular basis (per hour, per day) for the resources used. If you need to commit a user to paying for a whole month, this is not an elastic variable cost.
• No minimum charge, no contract.

All of the provisioning steps need to be automated. If a sales person needs to take the request to add/change a server or an engineer needs to provision the server for you, then this is not proper cloud computing.

Example 1:

Imagine you run a very busy and popular website for discussing the popular issues of the day. For your baseline load, you need a hefty database server and two webservers, in a load balanced configuration. However, at lunch time (say between 11am and 3pm), you experience a big spike in traffic as people read your website during lunch.

Prior to cloud computing, you would need to purchase and pay for the permanent hosting of another 3-4 servers to cater for that spike in load. However, with the Digiweb Cloud, your software could make an API call to provision 5 new cloud servers, of your standard web server template. Another API call adds them to your load balancer - and presto, you now have seven webservers serving your peak load.

Additionally, another API call can be made to increase the CPU and RAM available for your database server, giving you more horsepower for only when you need it.

However, since the Digiweb Cloud is charged on an hourly basis, you pay only for the four hours for those servers are online, saving you over three quarters of the cost. Flexible, powerful and extremely cost effective.

Example 2:

You have a large customer base of over 100,000 customers and once a month you need to generate transactions and invoices for them. However, this only runs on one night and it must be ready by morning, so the invoices can be sent out.

With traditional computing, you would need to buy, configure and run enough servers to process this batch load. For the rest of the month, they sit there idly - maybe turned off or maybe turned on and consuming power. With cloud computing, you can simply turn on the servers for that one night a month that you generate your invoices - and turn them off when you are done. When you grow and add more customers, you simply provision another cloud server, or increase the resources on your existing cloud servers to help generate the invoices on that night.

With a Digiweb Cloud server, you can run any 32 bit or 64 bit x86 operating system you wish! Most commonly, our customers use Windows Server, Linux or FreeBSD. The system allows you to install a cloud server’s operating system from any ISO image you wish, giving you total control over what you want to run. We also provide a range of pre-provided operating systems.

Once you’ve installed your cloud server, you can save a custom image of your server as a ‘template’ for future use.

We provide you with a server, which you can install with any OS you wish. Once installed, you can either access it over the internet (via SSH or RDP for example) or with our secure built-in web console which enables you to connect directly to the console of the cloud server, even if it is not connected to the internet or not even running an operating system!

Therefore, if you are comfortable installing your application on a server in your office, you’ll find it just as easy to do it with our Cloud.

All Digiweb Cloud servers run in a virtual private network, which separates all cloud servers owned by different users. Thus your cloud servers can never ‘see’ another user’s cloud servers, unless you both deliberately permit this to occur, using our network settings.

All data and servers are absolutely isolated from each other using the latest in virtualisation technologies, which is trusted by 99% of the Fortune 500 companies.

Additionally, Digiweb employ the best physical, network and process security measures in running the Digiweb datacentres and network, including the best practice in firewalling and DDoS protection. Digiweb is also currently working towards certification ISO27001.

In addition to all of these security measures, we of course recommend that users still secure their servers in exactly the same way as they would secure any normal server.

The Digiweb Cloud is securely hosted in our datacentre facilities in Dublin, Ireland. This means that your data is held under the jurisdiction of both the European Union and Irish data protection laws for maximum safety.

Dublin is very well placed to provide very fast internet access to the United States as well as Europe. Additionally, Digiweb peer at the major European peering points.

Digiweb’s cloud provides the ability to take a snapshot at any time, taking a point-in-time image of your entire cloud server. This snapshot ability can then be used to deploy a new virtual server, giving you the ability to create a point-in-time copy of your data and applications for simple backups and restoration. The snapshots can also be configured to run on an hourly, daily or weekly and monthly basis.

Digiweb’s cloud is build on enterprise-grade Dell server hardware and storage and networked using Cisco network equipment.

Additionally, cloud servers can have ‘high availability’ enabled where the cloud server is split across two or more physical machines. Therefore, in the event that a physical machine fails, all ‘high availability’ cloud servers are instantly brought up on another physical server, with no downtime detected.

The Digiweb cloud uses the industry standard Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format. This makes it simple to import and export your data and servers from our Cloud to another cloud. The VHD format is supported natively by the following virtualisation technologies:

• Citrix XenServer
• Microsoft Hyper-V
• Sun VirtualBox
• VMWare

More information is available here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHD_(file_format)

Additionally, the Digiweb cloud can be configured to accept AMI files from Amazon EC2. Talk to us for details on how we can import your Amazon EC2 servers.