PUBLIC CLOUD - HOSTING COMPANIES
How a hosting business from Croatia embraced CloudStack and offered Self-Sevice, Automated Billing and High Security(VPC) especially to government agencies and other customers.

CUSTOMER BACKGROUND
Our client was looking to bring about a change in their hosting business.
by implementing a more transparent and exact billing for usage of compute resources, No single point of failure and high security especially for their Government clients.
The client was very clear on their requirement to move into the cloud platform and was very well aware that this shift would cater all their requirements.
CHALLENGES
Customer Challenges
- Automate the orchestration of all the compute resources by deploying a CMP.Manual Invoicing/Chargeback
- Integrate a 3rd party billing solution (Hostbill) to their cloud platform which will be running on their enterprise grade Dell PowerEdge series servers for hypervisors.
- The primary and secondary storages on commodity hardware with 3 layer replications for No single point of failures.
- A virtual private cloud built inside a public cloud for specific clients looking at high security.

Our Approach
After carefully analyzing the requirement the cloud team at Assistanz suggested the client to go with CloudStack (https://cloudstack.apache.org/) engine because of it’s scalability and also it is easier to manage when compared with other commercial and open-source engines.
Assistanz followed an “everything on opensource” approach to build the cloud platform for the client based on their requirements with the following software:
IAAS platform
Cloudstack 4.7.1
Ceph
9.x(primary storage)
L3 Switch
Dell F10
Hypervisors
KVM (CentOS)
NFS
Secondary Storage
Total Capacity
(CPU : 700Ghz | Memory : 2TB | Primary Storage : 10 TB | Secondary Storage : 15TB)

AZ Execution

1. Design
Assistanz team successfully designed the entire cloud infrastructure along with the network setting & configurations and did the set-up along with the capacity calculations with recommended levels of VM density.

2. Setup
The whole setup process took around 2-3 weeks including design/deployments and benchmarking of hypervisor performance and storage.

3. Execution
The team at Assistanz successfully executed all the design and deployments completely from remote including the network configuration on L3 and routers.
BENEFITS
Benefits to the Client

Chargeback
Provide their clients with AWS style pay-per-use billing with transparent and flexible billing plans, also auditable records to validate in the event of a dispute.

Private within Public
Helps Government enterprises not only keep their data safe but also provides them with higher application performance and efficient bandwidth usage along with the benefits of public cloud platform.

High Availability
Helps the system to be redundant and ensures there is no single point of failure.