Cloud computing offers tremendous benefits for businesses looking to have a scalable, rapid server solution based upon fixed image types.  It seems that companies everywhere are looking to move their services into a cloud-based model, but there are new challenges for system administration that the cloud brings.  Servers are no longer the object - images are.  These images, when booted, are ephemeral - changes which are made to them will not persist if the instance is terminated.  IP addresses are no longer fixed - a new image will have a new IP.  Hostnames are dynamic.  If you bring up new instances to handle capacity, how do you monitor those instances to know that they're operating correctly?  The benefits of cloud computing are quickly overshadowed by the new problems that IT staff have to overcome in order to make the systems usable.  How do you bring all of this under control?

Introducing Cloud Control....

Arces Cloud Control interfaces with our configuration management system and our DNS infrastructure to give you control over the instances as they come online.  New instances configure themselves automatically and receive fixed hostnames mapped to their public and private IP addresses.  You no longer have to hunt for a system after it boots or manually change a configuration to point to a new database server after an update.  The instances behave exactly like real servers in a datacenter, and you control their function.  

Now that's flexibility.

How Does It Work?

A system is mapped to a role, either in the master image or in local configuration of an existing instance.  Upon boot (or reboot of the existing instance), the machine reaches back to our servers and receives an identifying host name based upon current network configuration and the role.  If you have 5 webservers and a new one boots up, it becomes web06 (or whatever hostname you define), after which it reaches out to our configuration management system and picks up all of its software and configuration.  Once this is done, it comes online.  Need a new app server instead?  Change the role in the configuration file and reboot.  Because all of the software configuration is handled off-site, you can control systems in any cloud environment, or even in your own datacenter.

....and Cloud VPN....

What if you already have a datacenter with machines, and you want to scale into the cloud when needed?  The biggest problem is that your network in the cloud is dynamic - even with fixed public IP addresses, you have to control firewall rules and inter-domain relationships using manual resources.  What if you could have your current IP space bridged to the cloud without having to cross network boundaries?  With our Cloud VPN service, you can.   We map new IP space over your existing space, connecting your cloud systems via an SSL tunnel with intelligent routing so that you have multiple paths into the cloud from your existing network.  The machines don't know if the machine is in the next switch port or the next state.  Like everything else that Arces provides, it just works.