cloud.ca worked closely with Used.ca to overcome early adoption challenges, allowing it to implement new technologies for its mobile apps, and ultimately expand its infrastructure usage three-fold within the same budget.
“The cloud” has evolved from humble beginnings ten years ago to a big tent word similar to “internet” and “web”. Most hosted services are now called “cloud” by the market, however amidst all this “cloud washing” the fundamental innovation of cloud computing is often overlooked - to be able to use what you need, when you need it. The ability to rightsize IT resources to changing requirements, combined with end-to-end automation of services via application programming interfaces (APIs), distinguishes cloud infrastructure services from traditional hosting services.
Wolverine is one of the most awesome superheroes in the Marvel Universe. It’s not because of his fierceness, the fact that he’s Canadian, or the fact that he has indestructible metal claws coming out of his fists. It’s because no matter what happens to him, no matter what harm he endures, he has a healing factor that lets him come back and continue to fight, time and time again. Wolverine can push bullets out from his wounds to heal, or regenerate from an atomic blast if he has to. He is the ultimate example of resilience and a metaphor for what you want in a cloud application — a soldier who keeps fighting for your business without being stopped.
cloud.ca, Canada’s cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), has earned its SOC 2 type 1 certification.
Renewable energy has been the hot topic in the cloud industry lately. Data centres for big players like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google require a lot of power, and I mean a LOT of power. One data centre consumes the equivalent energy of about 25,000 homes per year. Data centres are major sources of energy consumption and there is growing pressure on companies to be more socially responsible and to operate sustainably.
CloudOps has been helping companies leverage the power of cloud services for nearly as long as cloud services have been around. We were early adopters and evangelists of AWS and open source cloud technologies such as OpenStack, CloudStack and Docker. We understood the value of API-driven, self-service scalable infrastructure, and so did our customers. However, as the industry matured, we kept getting the same question: can I do this in Canada?
Image credit: Jessica Borutski
Recent European Union data protection regulation is pushing clouds back to the new world.
10 ms away from the Patriot Act
Many of the early adopters of our Canadian IaaS, cloud.ca, were organizations that write software and want to run it inside Canadian legal jurisdiction because they or their customers prefer Canada's laws for data protection and data privacy.
CloudOps is often asked to provide proposals for organizations migrating to cloud IaaS from their local or self-managed physical servers by people very experienced with virtualization, SANs and dedicated servers. Questions frequently come up about what level of RAID we use in cloud storage and how long it takes to increase the storage amount available to a server. There is also concern with using network storage, as it is perceived to be slower.
cloud.ca is a Citrix Ready verified regional IaaS, meaning that it is trusted to enhance Citrix solutions for cloud infrastructure and end-user compute workloads. As such, we were invited to demo our platform at Citrix Synergy a couple of weeks ago in Orlando, FL.
Earlier this month a CloudOps team attended Citrix Synergy in Orlando, FL. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, it's a three day event for Citrix partners and customers focused on enterprise mobility, not to mention a great place to network and have a bit of fun.
