Cloud-A Launches Vancouver OpenStack Cloud Node

Cloud-A-new

For immediate release

Cloud-A launches Vancouver, BC Nodeclouda-a-vancouver

Halifax, NS – July 21st, 2016 – Cloud A Computing Inc., a Canadian Public Cloud provider, announced today the launch of its first Western Canada cloud infrastructure node in Vancouver, British Columbia. The new node allows Cloud-A to better service the entire country with lower latency connectivity to its western customers, as well as satisfying data residency requirements for companies in BC.

The new node features all key Infrastructure-as-a-Service (“IaaS”) components, including compute, network, and storage. Similar to their existing Halifax, NS node, the BC node is built on Cloud-A’s OpenStack-based cloud platform. This platform gives customers the ability to spin up cloud infrastructure in a matter of minutes from both an easy-to-use web-based GUI and a powerful set of APIs.

“From day one, our mission has been to do be Canada’s cloud IaaS provider. We are now the first provider to truly launch a full multi-node, OpenStack cloud in Canada. This opens new doors for Canadian businesses who are looking for geographically dispersed data without the headaches of using legacy IT infrastructure.” says Jacob Godin, CEO of Cloud-A

The Vancouver, BC node was driven by the rapidly growing healthcare industry in BC, and was developed through a partnership with local healthcare-focused service company, Intogrey. Cloud-A is also extremely excited to help application development shops, IT management companies, and IT departments by providing a robust platform to use as a foundation for their products and services.

 

About Cloud-A

Cloud-A is the leading provider of public cloud Infrastructure based in Canada. Their products automate & simplify the installation and management of the hardware and software that provides the infrastructure for large scale environments having hundreds or thousands of servers supporting high performance compute applications. For more information visit www.CloudA.ca

 

Contact

Brandon Kolybaba, CMO
1-855-925-6831
marketing@clouda.ca

 

New Community Based Cloud-A Knowledge base

Screen Shot 2015-09-01 at 9.21.51 AMWe have happy to announce the launch of our new community based documentation platform available at http://docs.clouda.ca. We’ve updated and refreshed many of our existing docs and are committed to adding new documentation as new features are released.

The great thing about this new docs platform is that it is community based, meaning that we encourage Cloud-A user’s to contribute new documentation through the knowledge base GitHub page.

If you find any issues with our articles, feel free to create an issue or submit a pull request with any changes, and someone from our team will review.

Cloud-A Customers who contribute documentation or changes will be added to the Credits section, and awarded with a credit on their account for each accepted pull request.

We hope you enjoy!

Cloud-A Partners with Cloud66

We are happy to announce our partnership with Cloud 66, a leading provider of Devops-as-a-service, giving you everything you need to deploy, scale and protect your applications on Cloud-A in a single tool.

This partnership allows Cloud-A users to deploy and manage their applications more efficiently than ever before, offering one click, automated functionality for managing the lifecycle of your entire stack on Cloud-A which allows developers to do what they do best.

This partnership is part of an ongoing effort to provide Cloud-A users with world class tools to run their workflows on our high performing, secure, Canadian resident cloud servers.

Visit our Cloud 66 solutions page here for more details.

Press Release: Cloud-A Launches new High Performance Direct Fibre Network

Cloud-A Launches New High Performance Direct Fibre Network

Halifax, NS – Dec 19, 2014 – Cloud-A Computing Inc., a Canadian OpenStack Public Cloud provider, announced today, the launch of their new dedicated fibre network between their primary data centre facility in Halifax, Nova Scotia and the Toronto Internet Exchange in Toronto, Ontario.

The new network, which is the highest performing and most comprehensive direct fibre network offered by any Canadian Public Cloud provider, will not only provide Cloud-A customers with a single hop between their Halifax and Toronto data centre facilities, but also a direct connection to London, the Caribbean, and New York, leveraging Hibernia’s high capacity, low latency trans-atlantic fiber network.

Early indications of performance gains are that latency has been reduced by an average of 35% across the board.

“We know that network performance and reliability are extremely important to our clients. Investing in higher quality peering is a top priority for us, and this Hibernia link will open doors for us to continue extending the reach of our network both within and outside of our borders.” says Jacob Godin, Chief Technology Officer at Cloud-A “We are extremely excited to allow our clients to reach their users more efficiently. We believe it will enable them to better compete with providers in the US and beyond. It’s the kind of network that Canada’s cloud industry really needs.”

In addition to enhanced network performance, the new network allows for enhanced protection against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which Cloud-A has been victim of in the past. The one-hop to Toronto means that Cloud-A now peers with some of the worlds leading internet service providers, which expands Cloud-A’s DDoS mitigation strategy.

About Cloud-A

Cloud-A is the leading provider of public cloud Infrastructure based in Canada. Their products automate & simplify the installation and management of the hardware and software that provides the infrastructure for large scale environments having hundreds or thousands of servers supporting high performance compute applications. For more information visit www.CloudA.ca

Contact

Geoff Sullivan, Channel Manager & Public Relations

5562 Sackville Street, Halifax, NS, B3J 1L1

1-855-925-6831 ext. 703

info@clouda.ca

CLOUD-A LAUNCHES DATA CENTRE RECYCLING PROGRAM

For immediate release

Cloud-A launches Data Centre Recycling Program

Halifax, NS – Dec 4, 2014 – Cloud-A Computing Inc., a Canadian OpenStack Public Cloud provider, announced today a new program dubbed the “Data Centre Recycling Program” focused on offsetting the capital expenditures invested in traditional infrastructure, allowing Enterprises to move from on-premise infrastructure to the cloud. Not only can customers leave their traditional, labour intensive infrastructure tasks behind, and run on a bullet-proof, secure, and modern cloud — but they can now be paid to do it.

The program compensates customers for any existing server hardware that becomes decommissioned as a result of moving traditional hardware or virtualization platforms to Cloud-A’s true, whitelabelled public cloud. Customers fill out information about their decommissioned hardware through Cloud-A’s website, they are provided with a quote for the value of the hardware within 72 hours, and if the quote is accepted, the value of the hardware is instantly credited to their Cloud-A account which can equate to months of zero-cost cloud computing. The server hardware is refurbished and reused through a network of recycling partners.

“The Data Centre Recycling program helps prove organization’s business cases for moving to the cloud.” Says Brandon Kolybaba, CEO, Cloud-A. “The benefits of this program are threefold. Customers are financially incentivized to move to our modern cloud platform, the retired server hardware becomes refurbished and reused, and Cloud-A continues to grow its customer base.” says Kolybaba.

The program is a result of market research performed by Cloud-A which determined that some of the hesitation organizations have about migrating to the cloud is related to the existing level of investment in on premise infrastructure. There are also green motives for this program.

About Cloud-A

Cloud-A is the leading provider of public cloud Infrastructure based in Canada. Their products automate & simplify the installation and management of the hardware and software that provides the infrastructure for large scale environments having hundreds or thousands of servers supporting high performance compute applications. For more information visit www.CloudA.ca

Contact

Geoff Sullivan, Channel Manager & Public Relations
5562 Sackville Street, Halifax, NS, B3J 1L1
1-855-925-6831 ext. 703
info@clouda.ca

Your Cloud A, however you need it.

Flava

New Flavours!

We’re very excited to announce our new instance flavours. We know as well as anyone that a general purpose compute node is great, but once you start getting into larger instance sizes you have a better idea of the performance characteristics and demands of your server. After hitting the drawing board and crunching some numbers, we’ve put together two new flavour types: High Memory, and High Compute. These flavours are available on instance sizes greater than 4GB and you can start using them today from the instance launch screen.

Cost and Value Modelling

We spent a lot of time putting these new flavours together, to offer the best value for everyone no matter your needs. We will be updating our pricing page shortly to include the new flavour types. Once of the biggest challenges to introducing these new options was ensuring that we can present it in an un-intimidating and easy to understand manner. In the spirit of transparency and making sure you get the best value for your computing needs we took the time to model out the value proposition for three different types of demand: General Purpose Computing, High Memory, and High Compute. Graphing the relationship between the cost, and perceived value for each type of customer shows how these new flavour types are extremely valuable.

General Purpose

The General Purpose (GP) flavour type is for a user who requires a balanced, and powerful server. A user who values CPU, Memory, and Disk space equally. The High Memory and High Compute flavour types are less attractive in the general purpose case because they don’t provide equal increases across the board. You can see that the GP flavours really stand out.

General Purpose Value

High Memory

The High Memory (HM) flavour type is for a user who has more demand for memory than disk or CPU. Compared to the General Purpose version of the same flavour, HM instances have 60GB of disk space, and double the amount of memory. For memory heavy applications, the GP flavour type doesn’t make as much sense for you because you’re provisioned more CPU and Disk than you require and your values are not the same as a General Purpose user. Let’s view the same graph as a user who values memory over all else, and you can quickly see how the High Memory flavour is attractive for this user.

High Memory

High Compute

The High Compute (HC) flavour type is meant for users with heavy CPU requirements over memory and disk. Compared to the General Purpose version of the same flavour, HC instances have 60GB of disk space and twice the amount of CPU cores available. Let’s now view the same graph weighted for a user who values CPU over all else. Again, you can see how the High Compute flavour is very attractive over the General Purpose of the next size up.

High Compute

Summary

New Flavours Modal

These new flavour types will allow unparalleled cost savings and customization. Allowing you to build exactly the cloud that you need, without wasting money on resources you don’t need, all metered by the minute and running on our blazing fast hardware. If you already are using a General Purpose flavour and you would like to switch to a High Memory or High Compute flavour: simply save a snapshot of your current instance, and create a new instance using the new flavour restoring from that snapshot (assuming that it fits on disk).

We would love to hear your feedback on how you’re making use of the new flavour types to build your infrastructure, and you can get started immediately in your Dashboard. You will see the new flavours split up by type, with the full detailed breakdown in the sidebar.

2014 is off to a phenomenal start for us at Cloud A in January!

January was a big month for us, we successfully launched billing for our  public cloud offering and in doing so blew our projections out of the water by on-boarding 162% of the target we set out for ourselves! Thank you so much for all the folks who signed up especially those who gave us feedback (we value it very much).

Here is just a short list of some of the features we added in the last month:

  • Launched a new Client Portal
  • Improved signup flow process
  • Introduced the free credit for new signups
  • API Servers are now fully redundant
  • Improved reporting  engine to include predictive analysis
  • Improved the instance creation flow for all Windows VM’s
  • Streamlined the provision process for public IP assignment

We are also very excited that due to our newly redundant API servers, we had 100% uptime for both client instances, and API servers. Stability is critical to you and your business requirements, and we are always working hard to maintain it for our cloud.

In January we also compared our offering to see how it stacked up against Rackspace, Digital Ocean, & Linode and the results were very flattering to say the least: https://www.clouda.ca/blog/general/faster-than-rackspace-digital-ocean-and-linode/

It was really an amazing month and we can’t thank you enough for all your support, it’s really very exciting for us to have so much interest in what we are doing and look forward to seeing what happens in February.

A New Cloud A

We’re happy to announce the launch of our brand new client portal, refreshed website, and updated dashboard. All three were rolled-out last night, without a hitch. We’re live and excited to share the news with you!

New Client Portal

Client!

The brand new Client Portal helps you manage all of your Cloud A account details. The portal lets you easily sign up, modify your billing profile and view past invoices. Starting today, new signups will enter their billing information as part of the account activation process. Existing Cloud A customers will have until the end of the month to enter their information before we switch them over to the new billing process. If you’re an existing customer, we will be sending you an email shortly with instructions on how to add your billing details.

Coinciding with the launch of billing, we’re offering a $10 credit to new customers. We know jumping on to the cloud (or changing cloud providers) isn’t a decision to be taken lightly. To truly realize the value of the cloud, we want you to be able to run a full-scale deployment on our infrastructure. So, use your $10 credit however you like: choose from all our our instance sizes (as many as you need) and use all the storage you require. For more details, check out our pricing page.

Polished Website

Cloud A Home

The website has been completely overhauled and purpose built for giving you all of the information you need, as quickly as possible. Take a few minutes after you’re finished reading and have a look around!

With the new website and blog launch we will be publishing posts on some not-so-obvious use cases for moving to the cloud, as well as technical how-tos for our users to simplify the administration of their infrastructure on Cloud A.

Redesigned and Hardened Dashboard

dash-18

Last (but not least), our Dashboard has been given a significant face-lift. We went back to the drawing board with the dashboard design—we reworked the layout from the ground up to be more fluid, easy to use and consistent with the new Cloud A look. But the changes aren’t just skin deep. The Dashboard is integrated with the client portal’s new Single Sign On feature, so you can explore all of our tools without needing multiple logins. We’ve also spent a lot of time working with your feedback to improve the infrastructure provisioning workflow and squash bugs. We hope the new dashboard experience is much more enjoyable and productive for everyone.

We plan to keep up the pace and continuously release enhancements and fixes to our infrastructure. So, if you have any feedback, questions or concerns about any part of our launch don’t hesitate to email us at support@clouda.ca to speak with us directly!

Cloud A Launches Public Beta

Cloud A Launches Public Beta Offering

Offering a commercial OpenStack® powered elastic compute options for the first time in Canada.

For immediate release

Halifax, Nova Scotia, May 8th, 2013  – Cloud A (Clouda.ca) announced today that it will be offering its OpenStack® based elastic compute platform to the public in beta. “We identified the need for a true elastic compute platform in Canada early last year and have been working with OpenStack® to provide a solution to clients with data residency requirements in Canada,” said Brandon Kolybaba, Cloud A Co-Founder.

The company successfully completed Alpha trials in 2012 and subsequently a private beta testing period within a production environment located in Halifax over the past several months. Some publicly funded groups and government organizations require that their data to be stored in Canada, to comply with privacy laws. Other organizations simply want a Canadian solution to their on demand elastic compute and storage needs. To learn more about Cloud A’s roadmap to roll out its OpenStack® based solution in Canada please visit: http://www.clouda.ca/roadmap/

About Cloud A

Cloud A is a Canadian based cloud infrastructure solution where all data is stored in Canada and leverages OpenStack® at its core. This enables businesses and IT service providers to offer truly Canadian based cloud data solutions to their clients. The cloud infrastructure is provided as a service with elastic provisioning, provided as a utility and is scalable on demand.