Service Provider Solutions
Hosting Controller Service Provider Solutions are Business Opportunities for Different Types of Cloud Service Providers.
Cloud-Providers offering barebone cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is becoming a hyper-competitive market. Hosting Controller provides such service providers with an opportunity to go up the value chain by offering different software applications as hosted services.
Hosting Controller chooses to develop the automation required to offer higher-level software applications as a service and it specializes in major Microsoft enterprise applications which are in large use in many private businesses and government entities worldwide.
These solutions can either be offered as “Private Cloud” solutions or “Public Cloud” solutions. Every solution is based on Hosting Controller’s automation products.
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 the Hosting Controller through a remote desktop.
Automated Deployment
If the cloud-provider supports a pre-built VM image of the 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
Public Cloud Solutions
An application or a workload is said to be offered in a Public Cloud when the applications are deployed in a cluster arrangement with multiple customers sharing the same deployed instance in a multi-tenant setting.
If the underlying applications are not designed as multi-tenant out of the box (e.g. Microsoft Exchange), Hosting Controller adds that extra layer of multi-tenancy through specialized security settings.
Product Offerings in Public-Cloud
Since the cloud-provider is well aware of the functionality of the underlying applications in a public-cloud setting, its products are based on some core entities provided by the application and it bundled some physical resources with those entities and offer subscriptions for those entities. Examples of applications and their offered base entities are:
User accounts for Microsoft Exchange Server
Domains and Organizational Units for Active Directory Server
Websites for Web hosting servers
Databases for SQL and other database servers
Virtual machines for Hyper-V servers
Document repositories for SharePoint servers
Number of desktops for Remote Desktop Servers
Number of instances in VDI servers
Hosting Controller Support for Public-Cloud Offerings
Cloud-Provider needs to take the license of Hosting Controller for all the applications that it intends to support.
The cloud-provider also needs to integrate Hosting Controller with its upstream Order Management and Billing systems. Hosting Controller supports a few third-party billing systems out of the box.
Alternately, Hosting Controller also offers its own MarketPlace {hyperlink} application that enables a cloud-provider the required Order Management and Billing features.
Application Deployment for Public Cloud Offering
Cloud-Provider deploys a cluster of redundant and scalable servers for each of the underlying applications. It also works on steps for high-availability according to ISVs published best practices.
Details for Microsoft Exchange can be found at: Read More
Applications Licensing in Public Cloud
The end customer does not take any licenses when using applications in a public cloud. The cloud provider needs to get licenses from the respective ISV.
In the case of Microsoft, it has a special offering of licensing for service providers called SPLA (Service Provider License Agreement). The Cloud Provider needs to register for this and then report to Microsoft periodically how much resources are being consumed and pay for them.
Obviously, SPLA charges are in line with the subscriptions offered to end customers and their costs need to be built into the subscriptions’ prices offered.
Revenue From Public Cloud Offerings
Public cloud revenue comes from customers subscribing to offered products. Products are usually created as bundles of one or more applications. For Microsoft applications, the product bundles are usually similar to what Microsoft offers in its own public cloud of ‘Microsoft 365’.
Value Added Services in Public Cloud
Extra services and resources are consumed by the cloud-provider in a public cloud offering. Examples could be keeping two copies of data or three copies of data or keeping data in geographically redundant locations etc.
SLA Responsibilities in Public Cloud
In a public cloud, the cloud-provider covers the full range of responsibilities to keep the services running.
Billing and Order Management in Public Cloud
Cloud provider needs specialized order management systems to take orders for product offerings. Such orders are then communicated to Hosting Controller which then provisions the required entities and assigns resources to those entities as per the quotas included in the product offering.
Hosting Controller supports its own Order Management and Billing product called Market Place Hosting Controller also supports a few third-party billing systems. As an example, see: Read More
Multi-Cloud Options for Public Cloud Offerings
A Multi-Cloud scenario is where some services of a product bundle are offered through a third-party cloud provider.
A typical example supported by Hosting Controller is to offload some services to the ‘Microsoft 365’ cloud offering. Services like Microsoft Teams and Yammer may be bundled together and offered through Microsoft 365 while other services like Exchange, SharePoint, Active Directory and others are provided through cloud-provider’s own infrastructure.
For the services bundled together from Microsoft 365, Microsoft charges based on its CSP (Cloud Solution Provider) prices.
Hosting Controller Public Cloud Solutions
Hosted Exchange Public Cloud
Hosted VPS Public Cloud
Shared Webhosting
Hosted Active Directory Public Cloud
Hosted RDS Public Cloud