Private Cloud Solutions
An application or a workload is said to be offered in a Private Cloud when an instance of that application is instantiated only for a single customer. In other words, these are single-tenant deployments. Customer usually has root-level access to the operating system as well as the application(s) deployed on that machine.
To set up an application in a Private Cloud, the customer orders one or more virtual machines with the cloud-provider, running Windows or Linux operating system with enough resources to be able to run the intended applications.
Once the machines are ready, the customer installs the intended applications through remote desktop or remote shell scripts.
Hosting Controller Support for Private Cloud Offerings
Every customer seeking a private cloud solution supported by Hosting Controller needs to have its own instance of Hosting Controller. They can get their instance of Hosting Controller in two ways:
- Manual Installation — The customer gets an instance of Windows Server and does a manual installation of Hosting Controller through a remote desktop.
- Automated Deployment — If the cloud-provider supports a pre-built VM image of Hosting Controller, the customer can use it to get an instance running Hosting Controller.
- Adding Application Servers to Hosting Controller to Enable Automated Management — The cloud-provider does not have visibility into actual modules of the Hosting Controller control panel being used by any customer and actual resources consumed within those modules. The customer will get a 30 days evaluation license of Hosting Controller when a new instance is instantiated and after that, it needs to get licenses for Hosting Controller directly from the hostingcontroller.com website.
Product Offerings in the Private Cloud
Private cloud product offerings are based on instances of supported applications. To support Private Cloud offerings, Hosting Controller offers pre-built images of virtual machines with intended applications already installed on them.
Cloud-Providers can add value to their products by including these pre-built images in their virtual machines offerings.
Application Deployment in Private-Cloud
When a customer needs an application instance, it instantiates these machines from the cloud-provider virtual machines image library. It gets a fully configured and running instance of the application exclusively for itself. The customer can then add the application server into its instance of Hosting Controller with an appropriate role.
Applications Licensing in Private-Cloud
For the most part, the customer uses the applications under Bring Your Own License (BYOL) terms. In some cases, the cloud-provider can also offer application licenses to customers through volume licensing from the original ISV like Microsoft.
Revenue From Private-Cloud Offerings
The cloud-provider offers the underlying applications as 'Hosted Private Cloud'. The end customers benefit from all the automation available through Hosting Controller. Cloud-Provider may choose to charge software application instances at the same rate as its barebone infrastructure or it may choose to charge a premium.
Value Added Services in Private-Cloud
Cloud-Provider may add further value to private cloud offerings despite its limited visibility into their offerings. Examples are:
- Storage based VAS — Cloud-Provider allows taking snapshots of virtual machine instances through its virtualization technology. They can also offer connected NAS drives where the end-users can take backups from within the applications and also restore them when needed.
- Network-based VAS — Cloud-Providers offer a combination of virtual and physical IP addresses to map their virtual machines. They can also offer options to move virtual IP addresses from one machine to another in case of some availability issues. Cloud-Providers also offer load-balanced IP addresses where traffic is distributed at layers 3, 4 or 7 into multiple instances of the same application.
- Compute based VAS — Cloud-Providers offer upsizing and downsizing of the CPU and RAM resources of the allocated machines. They also offer creating / destroying newer virtual machines to be added to the application cluster as and when needed by the end customer.
SLA Responsibilities in Private-Cloud
The Cloud-Provider is fundamentally responsible for keeping the infrastructure of compute, storage and networking up and running. It does not have any visibility into the actual application instances and what KPIs and Metrics are defined at the application level.
The customer on the contrary is responsible for application-level monitoring. In case of a service incidence, the customer will use options within the application to take mitigation action and may at times use controls provided by the cloud-provider at the infrastructure level (e.g. moving virtual IP address to other application instances etc.)
Order Management and Billing in Private-Cloud
Cloud-Provider may not need any extra or special billing and order management tools to support private cloud instances. The minimal requirements for an existing tool are to enable end-customer to create new virtual machines based on images provided in a library.
Hosting Controller Private-Cloud Solutions
- Microsoft Exchange Private-Cloud
- Microsoft Apps Hybrid-Cloud
- Web Hosting Private-Cloud
- Microsoft RDS Private-Cloud
