

Announcing Brightbox Cloud – the UK's first true cloud hosting platform - petercooper
http://beta.brightbox.com/beta

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nwmcsween
Software there are most likely using (or at least what I would look into):

\- libvirt <http://libvirt.org/>

\- whackamole <http://www.backhand.org/wackamole> or ucarp
<http://www.ucarp.org/project/ucarp>

\- sheepdog <http://www.osrg.net/sheepdog> and maybe ceph in testing
<http://ceph.newdream.net/>

\- conntrackd <http://conntrack-tools.netfilter.org/>

There I gave away all my secret sauce.

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smiler
This looks good. I don't have anything to use it for at the moment, but being
UK based, I've often wondered about cloud solutions and found them US centric,
so looking forward to seeing how this evolves.

Especially looking forward to seeing the pricing!

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DrJokepu
Really, really cool.

One question: Does "almost any operating system" include Windows?

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petercooper
I spoke to John (BB's top techie and co-founder) at an event we were both at
this weekend and I hope I didn't misunderstand him but I believe so. He said
pretty much anything you could get running in VMware, you could package up and
run on BB's new infrastructure. I forget what hypervisor he said they were
using though..

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8ren
I like the idea of Zones on different continents.

Not only can this provide faster responses for each continent, but it also
enables peak times in one time-zone to be supplemented by resources in off-
peak time-zones. Though I guess the latter is true of any cloud
infrastructure, even if centralized.

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jeremyjarvis
This would need some sort of "global load balancing" prob using DNS. Zones in
Brightbox are similar to Availability Zones on EC2, isolated but
interconnected datacentre facilities within the same city.

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patrickgzill
There are 2 ways to do it, one is called anycast and the other is using DNS
and GeoIP to split responses depending on where the request is coming from
(e.g. request from USA - return DNS entry for a US-based VPS).

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thehodge
I've been using this for the past few weeks and its fantastic no GUI as of yet
but a really simple to use command line tool.

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petercooper
What I like is it offers the pros of both the basic EC2 service (with cloud
IPs too) and your more typical Linode-esque service. Besides, there are few
enough new plays in the UK hosting space so it's always good to see that too.

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dawson
I'm also interested to know the pros of this service vs. say Linode's UK data
centre?

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petercooper
I have two VPSes at Linode's UK data centre as well as a Brightbox VPS I just
obtained. I'm not sure I can come up with a fair apples-for-apples benchmark
though I might try fetching some big files from the US just to see how they
both fare with connectivity.. If anyone _can_ recommend some good, fair tests
though, I'd be happy to try them.

Update: As a basic test I did some ping runs. Linode benched on average just
1% lower latency over 10 pings _but_ had higher max latency so was less
consistent. On Brightbox latency was spookily consistent.

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kierank
Wasn't Flexiscale the first UK cloud service?

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jeremyjarvis
"Offering VPSes at a single datacentre (even with an API) is, in our humble
opinion, not a "cloud". There are actually very few existing "true" cloud
providers - Amazon EC2 is, of course, currently the largest and most well
known." -- FAQs

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kierank
Flexiscale isn't a VPS provider IMO. Although they've changed the pricing
model a bit, you can purchase servers per hour like Amazon and scale up and
down without problems.

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deutronium
Wouldn't linode / EC2 be the UKs first cloud hosting?

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jeremyjarvis
Brightbox is the first in the UK with cloud-like features such as isolated
(and interconnected) Zones.

EC2 eu-west datacentres are in Ireland.

