Cloud Chameleon

Many cloud providers offer elastic ‘pay-as-you-use’ models so it’s no surprise that the words ‘scalability’ and ‘flexibility’ are so common. But do they really offer clients more control or are they just part of the technological precipitation from a saturated cloud market?

A lot of the inflexibility can be explained by pre-made hardware and software that simply gets stuck together to create a cloud platform. Yes, it can be good quality but imagine building something out of Lego bricks. It looks good but what if you want to be more innovative? What if you want to add something that’s not just another red plastic brick? Out-of-the-box software does the job but it can also be very limiting for clients who want to add new features to their solution.

This is perhaps why internet hosting company UKFast’s new cloud product is generating interest across the industry. The company have dubbed their eCloud solution the first truly elastic cloud to be designed, built and wholly-hosted in the UK. Built by in-house architects on the very best hardware from vendors such as Cisco, HP and SGI, it utilises an orchestrator designed and created by the firm’s Enterprise and RnD teams.

The UKFast orchestrator is a bespoke piece of software that enables architects to integrate new features and technologies on request. Imagine ringing up your hosting provider and being able to say, “Hey, I need this need my solution to do X, Y and Z; can you adapt the solution for us?” This is innovation at its best, indicative of a whole new approach to cloud technology that prioritises versatility and true flexibility!

The orchestrator also enables a greater level of customer control, allowing customers do a lot more from an online client portal. And as for reliability; the eCloud has been divided into isolated Pods that have no real interconnection and a completely isolated infrastructure so in theory any issue affecting one pod cannot propagate to the other.

UKFast’s CEO, Lawrence Jones, has spoken about eCloud’s ability to adapt to client needs, commenting: “This is where we want to be – we didn’t want eCloud to have a short shelf life. Technology is shifting and changing all the time – we want to be able to move with it and add new modules and devices as and when. With eCloud, we can integrate new services on demand and embrace new technologies seamlessly. I’m always reminded of Wayne Gretzky’s advice to ‘skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.’ I think we’ve managed to achieve this with eCloud.”