Cloud Provider Playbook

It is important to clearly define the target audience of your sales and marketing activities to be able to plan out efficient market entry.

Example 1: If your target customers are more demanding for high performance than cheap price then you are best making an investment into higher-spec hardware like 25 Gbit network interfaces and NVMe disks that significantly improve the block storage IO performance.

Example 2: If you are going big to the object storage market then obviously you would need servers with a lot of disk bays and cheap and slow hard disks.

Below are listed some of the most popular solutions your company can offer after launching with the Warren-based cloud offering.

Cloud computing workloads

Virtualized workloads are primarily covered with virtual machine self-service or API capabilities of the Warren cloud platform.

• The paying customers of your company’s cloud offering can:
  Create virtual machines with a wide selection of operating systems to run every kind of application your end-users want to run in the cloud.
• One-click applications can be produced to run on virtual machine images. This is a separate catalog presented to the user right after logging into the Warren self-service.
• The quickly growing cloud-native market targeted either 3rd party managed Docker Swarm providers or the upcoming native Kubernetes feature of Warren’s self-service platform.

Distributed storage

Both storage products of object and block storage rely on a distributed storage technology called Ceph. It is redundant to every kind of hardware failure and keeps your data distributed across the whole Ceph storage cluster. That means that even in case of multiple simultaneous hardware failures your data will stay intact because of its nature of distributed and replicated storage.

Another huge benefit of distributed storage enables the Warren platform to perform live migrations in case of hypervisor server hardware failure. That means that Warren automatically migrates the VM to an available hypervisor node and links it to the virtual hard disk stored in a distributed Ceph cluster with no interruptions. Your end-user virtual machines, therefore, experience no downtime in case of hardware failure.

You are also able to move virtual machines and their storage around to the desired hypervisor for example if you want to isolate a potential bad actor from other users to investigate further or separate resource-heavy workloads from the rest to dissolve potential resource starvation. These operations can be carried out from the Warren admin panel and take seconds to complete (depending on the size of the VM storage disks, backups, and snapshots).

Block storage

In addition to the virtual hard disks that you can add to your virtual machines, there are two more block storage products that you can easily monetize.

• Backups – distributed storage backups can be enabled by the end-user with one click and can be restored as easily to the previous state.
• Snapshots – are technically the same as backup images but serve a different workflow. For example, if the end-user would like to take a snapshot before they try new technology and the technology doesn’t work as expected then it is easy to restore your VM to its previous state before the failed experiment.

Object storage

A storage option is focused on storing large amounts of data with lower performance needs. Also normally a lot less expensive compared to block storage. In Warren stack, this feature is optional and/or can be added later, but is important for many end-users and is often consumed together with other resources.

Some of the most common object storage use cases include:

• Backup storage
• Log rotations
• Disaster recovery
• Data archives
• Media storage

Managed services market

Warren features the necessary underlying functionality needed to offer managed services either by the cloud provider inhouse team or a 3rd party who has specialized in some specific service category. Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are companies who offer IT products and solutions as a service. The MSPs featured on the Warren platform are aiming to stand out by service offerings that are:

• Redundant
• Higher performance
• Highly available
• Always up to date
• Secure

Managed services provided generally fall into the following categories:

• Databases
• Message queues
• Security platforms
• Storage and recovery
• Backups
• Network services
• Managed data center and IT infrastructure services
• Managed communication and collaboration services
• Managed information (resource) solutions (like SAP or Microsoft Dynamics etc)