Announcing Brightbox Cloud – the UK's first true cloud hosting platform

http://beta.brightbox.com/beta

by petercooper • 16 years ago

30 20 16 years ago

beta.brightbox.com

thehodge• 16 years ago

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.

petercooper4• 16 years ago

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.

dawson• 16 years ago

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

deutronium• 16 years ago

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

jeremyjarvis3• 16 years ago

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

EC2 eu-west datacentres are in Ireland.

stevejalim• 16 years ago

Being a pedant, while EC2 is available in the UK, the nearest datacentres are (I believe) in Ireland, which isn't part of the UK.

smiler• 16 years ago

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!

kierank2• 16 years ago

Wasn't Flexiscale the first UK cloud service?

petercooper4• 16 years ago

I think I might have caused confusing by "tweaking" the title on submission. Brightbox claim to be "the UK’s first true IaaS platform" but I wasn't familiar with the term IaaS (though I know what it stands for). It seems, to me, that "IaaS" has a little more to it than just selling VPSes which companies have been doing for ages.

jeremyjarvis3• 16 years ago

"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

kierank2• 16 years ago

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.

8ren2• 16 years ago

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.

jeremyjarvis3• 16 years ago

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.

patrickgzill• 16 years ago

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).

8ren2• 16 years ago

We currently have two Zones in Manchester, UK - we plan to launch additional regions in separate geographical locations throughout Europe and the US in due course. http://beta.brightbox.com/beta#faqs

DrJokepu• 16 years ago

Really, really cool.

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

petercooper4• 16 years ago

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..

nwmcsween• 16 years ago

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.

Announcing Brightbox Cloud – the UK's first true cloud hosting platform

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