Cloud Provider Playbook

The Warren cloud platform is set up by the Warren team as a part of the services included with the Warren platform and managed services package.

From purchasing hardware until the production release of the public cloud solution a constant exchange of information will take place and is tracked and stored in a Warren Onboarding Project (WOP) spreadsheet provided before the onboarding process. The communication itself can take place either in a dedicated Slack channel, over conference calls, or via emails.

The initial information required to launch a production-ready Warren-based public cloud service is available in more detail in the Warren Onboarding Project (WOP) document itself. The details required in the WOP document include:

• Introduction – high-level project timeframe, contact details, legal information.
• Scoping and preparations – cloud services to be provided, payment model and gateway details, design materials, TLD and subdomains, mandatory pre-launch feature requests.
• Hardware overview – hardware-related information, management VPN credentials, networking configuration, growth plans.
• Hardware and access details – list of physical servers, specifications, and access details.
• Network topology diagram
• Platform configuration – pricing of the cloud resources, initial free credits, end-user support system details, admin access email addresses.
• User acceptance testing
• Public launch and support – launch details, brief and high-level marketing plans for the first 6 months.

Example onboarding document

Minimum hardware requirements

Warren supports multiple data centers and can scale up to thousands of servers. The hardware requirements below enable an initial minimum setup to get Warren up and running and get you started as a public cloud provider. The following examples focus on a classical deployment with separate control, compute, and storage nodes. Block storage can also be deployed as a hyper-converged setup if necessary. The Warren platform is hardware agnostic and works well with most hardware available (including Open Compute, Intel-based, AMD-based).

Control domain servers

To run a redundant Warren cloud platform we require a minimum of 3 separate physical servers. 

Virtualization hypervisor servers

Although there are no strictly defined minimum system requirements for virtualization hosts, it is recommended to start with at least 4 nodes to enable all features.

Block storage servers

Warren requires a cluster of Ceph distributed storage for block and object storage. Here is one example of a recommended block storage node, but these can differ quite a bit depending on the size of the cluster and workload requirements.

Network hardware

For production environments that want to offer high-quality service, it is highly recommended to use specialized network hardware for routing your cloud traffic. We recommend the Juniper MX series, but equipment from other vendors is often supported as well.

Alternatively for small businesses, it is possible to use Juniper vMX routing software. Every deployment of course also needs switches, but there are no specific requirements for them. In the case of all network devices, it is expected that redundancy is always taken care of to deliver quality service.

Object storage servers (optional)

Object storage is a completely standalone service and has no specific relation to the rest of the cluster. Therefore, the deployment of Warren can be done completely without it, and also the size and scaling are not correlated specifically with the rest of the services. 

The Warren team has close relationships with hardware vendors and is happy to connect with suppliers in different regions. Please contact us for more details at [email protected].