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.

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!