CloudSigma And Its Flexible, Elastic and Transparent Public Cloud IaaS

Choosing from one of more than a dozen different Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud providers
(IaaS) can be tiresome. Pricing comparisons are difficult, figuring out features isn't always obvious,
and understanding their limitations can be vexing and require a great deal of time and research. But
if you are looking for a capable cloud provider that lets you have a lot of flexibility, is transparent
when it comes to cost calculations, and comes with ability to support many different virtual
machine (VM) configurations, then you should consider CloudSigma's solution. Let's take a closer
look.
What virtual machines choices are available? Some cloud providers limit you to just a few major
OS options, while others such as CloudSigma (and IBM's Smart Cloud) have dozens of pre-loaded
VM images that go beyond the OS and include a wide collection of more than 100 different
application servers, as you can see from the screenshot below. It is simple to copy one of them and
start it up in your account. CloudSigma goes a step further and will support any x86-compatible
image on its cloud. You can upload it directly, bring your own licensed OS, or mix and match a
combination of custom and pre-set images.

What is bundled or pre-packaged together? Some vendors have servers in pre-packaged options
with a given CPU, RAM and disk configuration that you can start from, while others have you build
your virtual machines from scratch where you can specify each item. One vendor offers a prepackaged image of Microsoft's Exchange 2010 server with only 25 GB of storage, which seems
somewhat underpowered. Another offers three different plans that limit the number of IP addresses

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and storage configurations, which may or may not meet your needs.
Rather than try to put together a bundle of resources, CloudSigma makes it easy to assemble the
kind of machine that you need. And you only pay for what you need, when you need it. You set up
the machine with the exact set of CPU, RAM, disk and network resources that are necessary: not
more and not less. You don't need to remember what the configuration of the super-small bundle or
the quadruple-extra-large bundle: you just key in what you want for your machine's parameters.
Can you burst your CPU and other resources? Part of the promise of the cloud is in being able to
quickly scale up and down when demand changes, but many providers either don't make it easy or
add prohibitive fees to make this happen. A few have gotten the message: one provider (Cloudshare)
will allocate additional RAM to your VMs with no additional charge if you just send them an email
asking for the change.
Another provider (Savvis' Symphony Virtual Private Data Center) bills its Internet bandwidth based
on the 95th percentile of what you use over the course of the month at a fixed rate of $50 per MB/s,
and excludes that calculation from its Web calculator, making it probably the most obscure
surcharge of all the providers we've seen.
Some (like GoGrid) set monthly usage maximums and charge for overages, just like your cell phone
company when you exceed your data plan. This means that you need to keep a running tally of your
monthly usage of their service to ensure that you know your consumption and are below the cutoff
of your particular plan. And another provider (Joyent) will burst your VM to double the initial
assigned cores at no additional charge.
CloudSigma doesn't have fine print or a pricing plan that takes a CPA to figure out. You buy a
subscription for any collection of resources. If you exceed the subscription, you pay the overage
cost for the CPU, RAM and outgoing bandwidth that you use. Your costs are calculated every five
minutes, so if your VM is running for a short time you don't have to pay for the entire hour that
some other providers charge. They also put a maximum cap on overage charges to protect you in
case you need a lot more capacity, but chances are you won't exceed the cap.
What does the Web-based dashboard show you? With some providers (such as Amazon), you
don't have any overall dashboard giving you the entire lay of your cloud-based landscape but have
to go examine several different places to get the complete picture of your virtual datacenter and
resource usage. With CloudSigma, everything is on one screen showing you your servers, your
account settings, and all your resource consumption. Your subscriptions are plainly available with a
click of the mouse, and you can quickly extend any item if you are running low on CPU or disk
allocations, calculate what it is going to cost and what discounts can apply, and whether you have
funds available in your account as you can see from the screenshot below.

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Can you anticipate pricing changes? All of the cloud providers are fond of changing prices
frequently, typically lowering them as their costs come down on storage and memory. While this is
nice, it makes it hard to keep track of costs and also makes it difficult to change your own strategy
when it comes time to adjusting your VM configurations and resource consumption. CloudSigma
publishes your pricing changes in a public RSS feed, which is a very interesting idea. This means
you have complete transparency when it comes to understanding what your monthly bill is going to
look like.
One of the less talked about features of cloud computing is that billing is not necessarily always
usage-based, nor it is consistently applied across all of a vendor's offerings. Some items are billed
whether a virtual machine is up and running or if you are even using the service at all during the
month. For example, some providers (Verizon's Computing as a Service SMB and Rackspace)
charge for all of your configured VMs whether or not they are actually turned on and running. If
you just want to set up a test VM environment and try out a few things, and then turn it off, you
would be better to use someone else that doesn't continue charging you. And some providers (such
as Amazon and IBM) charge you for virtual private network access to your cloud whether you use it
or not.
CloudSigma bills you for what you use, when you use it. There is no mystery, no hidden charges, no
complex explanations or exceptions or odd surcharges that crop up under certain conditions.
Obviously, if you have hundreds of VMs that are set up on a series of virtual drives, even when
those machines are turned off you are still consuming storage units and will be billed accordingly.
But if you don't need their data, you can easily delete and re-clone these machines when you next
need them and save some money in the process.
How easy it is to obtain a private IP address and set up hybrid clouds? Some providers charge
extra for this (CloudSigma charges $10 per month per IP address] while others (like Rackspace)
provide it for free. Setting this up with CloudSigma is a matter of checking one box on the initial
configuration screen. You can build a private or hybrid cloud network just as easily as you can set
up any other VM on their service.
What are any extra charges for OS/apps licensing and support fees? Some vendors include
costs for the underlying OS or applications software licenses, some have surcharges. For example,
one provider (Rackspace) has add-on management support fee of 12 cents per server hour along
with a $150 monthly fee if you choose their Cloud Sites management option. Another (Terremark's
vCloud Express) tacks on 20% or $500 a month for priority support, whichever is higher, and also
adds to its hourly fees if you want a Windows image. And a third (Amazon) offers its customers

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one-on-one support of various levels starting at an extra $50 a month.

CloudSigma's licensing fees are specified up front on their pricing page, showing you fixed monthly
costs for various Microsoft Windows Server versions. There is no additional charge for support.
Does your provider offer solid state hard drives as a storage option? The notion of using solid
state drives for desktop PCs is catching on, and now many of the storage array vendors are also
offering tiered storage mixing rotating and solid state media. CloudSigma has this as an option for
any of its storage repositories. You just check a box when you are configuring your VM and you are
done, as you can see in the screenshot below. Of course, using an SSD will carry a higher rate than
using a traditional rotating drive.

What about root access/false bottom? With some cloud providers, you don't really have root
access to your VMs but have to rely on the support staff at the provider to reboot a hypervisor or to
clear a non-responsive VM. This isn't the case with CloudSigma, which offers complete access to
your VMs. In fact, the VMs behave just like regular physical servers. Users can start, stop and
restart them. Users can mount and unmount drives and customize networking settings like adding a
static IP or VLAN.
Does your provider offer API access to your VMs? CloudSigma does, and is based on the open
cURL syntax. Others (such as Amazon) have their own proprietary syntax or don't offer commandline access to control their clouds.

IaaS Summary Comparison Table

Vendor

OS choice

Amazon

Moderate

CloudSigma

Extensive and
custom
Limited
Limited
Moderate

GoGrid
Google
Rackspace

Billing unit
increments
Hourly

Burst policy

5 min

Simple

RAM-Hours
Hourly
Hourly

Complex
N/A
Free when
available

N/A

Private Cloud
Service
Limited with
Virtual Private
Cloud
Hybrid Hosting
Hybrid Hosting
No
RackConnect

CLOUDSIGMA AG
Sgereistrasse 35 CH-8152 Glattbrugg Switzerland
T: +41 44 585 39 07 - F: +41 44 732 60 43 - E: info@cloudsigma.com - W: www.cloudsigma.com
Company N CH-020.3.034.422-0 VAT N CH 749 910

Summary

CloudSigma offers the right mix of VM flexibility, price transparency, granularity of pricing and the
ability to customize your cloud the way it makes the most sense for your particular needs. It has
unrivaled price/performance and predictable costs that take the uncertainly and monthly "bill shock"
out of cloud computing.
About the author
David Strom is a leading expert on networking and Internet communications. He has written two
books and thousands of articles on the topic over the past 25 years for most of the major American
IT publications and appeared on numerous TV and radio programs as well. He was the founding
editor-in-chief of Network Computing magazine and has managed dozens of Web-based editorial
sites for computing enthusiasts, IT managers, VARs, electronics engineers, and network
applications developers. He can be reached at david@strom.com or online at strominator.com.

CLOUDSIGMA AG
Sgereistrasse 35 CH-8152 Glattbrugg Switzerland
T: +41 44 585 39 07 - F: +41 44 732 60 43 - E: info@cloudsigma.com - W: www.cloudsigma.com
Company N CH-020.3.034.422-0 VAT N CH 749 910