Deliver Cloud Based Services with Cloud-A

serviceproThe market is certainly in the midst of the as-a-service trend, and it makes sense. Businesses are able to procure the end-to-end technology solutions that they once purchased as a capital expenditure, as a converged solution that integrates infrastructure, software and managed services into a fee-per-month model.

While the darlings of Silicon Valley have been making billions of dollars off of this model for the last decade (think Salesforce) we have found that service providers have been slower to adopt it.

We see businesses come to us every day looking to build out their own solutions on Cloud-A, but many lack the resources or will to deploy the infrastructure, build or install software and manage the ongoing operations. Many are looking for a service provider to deliver a given solution as-a-service, which creates a phenomenal opportunity for service providers to deliver their solutions as-a-service on Cloud-A.

Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of delivering solutions as-a-service on Cloud-A.

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Big Data in the Cloud

BIG DATA (3)
We have been seeing an increasing demand for Big Data workflows on Cloud-A. Many companies, big and small are looking for greater business intelligence to make more informed decisions more quickly and get ahead of the competition. The public cloud provides an ideal home for many organization’s Big Data platforms as it reduces the initial investment in hardware and also prevents the ongoing problem of over allocating or under allocating infrastructure resources.??

We find that many companies are looking for a guiding hand on selecting their Big Data framework, whether Hadoop or Spark, but at the end of the day, we feel that choosing the right elastic infrastructure platform will be the biggest, and most important decision you make in building out a Big Data solution. We do not necessarily believe that an organization should choose “one solution or the other” (Hadoop or Spark) but they should have the agility and flexibility to select the right tool for each job.

Let’s take a look at the benefits of running your Big Data systems on Cloud-A

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Cloud-A Backup Methods

At Cloud-A, we have opted to allow our users to design their own backup strategies for their Cloud-A VMs, using whatever backup solution our users are comfortable with, since backups are not a one-size fits all solution. Application servers, database servers and file servers all have different uptime requirements, durability, and loss acceptance. With that said, we quite often get asked what backup software we see used most often on our Cloud through interactions with our users. Here is a list of backup software tried and tested by our users to help you decide on the best backup strategy for your Cloud-A stacks.

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Cloud-A Sponsors Waterloo Codefest

We are very happy to announce our sponsorship of Waterloo Codefest, an “Open-Data” Hackathon hosted by the City of Waterloo to continue the city’s commitment to providing open and transparent data. Cloud-A is pleased to be providing a free year of cloud infrastructure to the winner of the Hackathon to support the commercialization of the winning application. In addition to Cloud-A’s contribution, our partner Cloud 66 is also providing $500 in free DevOps-as-a-service to the winner.

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Introducing Cloud-A for Teams

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You have spoken and we have delivered! After extensive user feedback that included focus groups, surveys and interviews, we have released v1.0 of Cloud-A for teams. This is a free functionality that will allow Cloud-A user account admins to invite their project team members and issue roles with varying access capabilities. We see this functionality working especially well for:

Development and Operations teams

Where multiple team members are working on different projects and/or clients. Each team member will have their own username and password, rather than sharing one set of credentials for an entire team. Having identified that many development teams have limited operations resources, we feel that this is a step in the right direction towards marrying Dev and Ops together into one, unified and collaborative team. 

Service providers

Some clients are self-sufficient and can perform several dashboard related tasks themselves.

Cloud-A team functionality will provide service providers with a great amount of flexibility, allowing their clients to have varying amounts of access to their Cloud-A infrastructure for these tasks.

Contractors

Teams will have the ability to create accounts for independent contractors or specialists who need dashboard access for a given project temporarily. No longer will you have to share your username, password and billing information with resources external to your company.

Here is a tutorial on how to use the new team functionality.  

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Save 30% on CloudBerry Backup Server Edition

Cloud-A’s branded connector for CloudBerry products now spans the entire CloudBerry backup product suite. In celebration, the folks at CloudBerry are offering Cloud-A users an exclusive 30% discount on CloudBerry Backup Server Addition. Cloudberry products allow you to backup your on-premise, or cloud based Windows server to Cloud-A Bulk Storage for reliable, cost effective offsite backup and archival.

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