Announcing Brightbox Cloud – the UK's first true cloud hosting platform | Hacker News Reader

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

beta.brightbox.com

30 pointspetercooper20 comments

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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.

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!

Really, really cool.

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

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..

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

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

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.

afaik Brightbox have multiple physical data centre locations, so you can do the same kind of multi-zone deployment you can with EC2 in the US. Linode have one data centre, it will obviously have diverse power and connectivity but it's still one physical location (remember, even Rackspace who clearly have diverse everything still have downtime in their flagship data centre which is one physical location http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rackspace#Downtime)

Wasn't Flexiscale the first UK cloud service?

"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

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.

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.

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

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

EC2 eu-west datacentres are in Ireland.

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.

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