The holidays came and went, and while we hope you’ve had a great start for the year 2019, it’s only going to get better. A new year is a time of new plans and oh boy do we have much on the roadmap for this year! And while having plans is great, we wished to also include you, our users, in all the excitement and anticipation.
We want to deliver on these plans and aim to keep us on our toes by creating something that will be the roadmap for our future developments. In this post, we’ll be taking a peek at what we have in store for you and what we want to accomplish in the coming months.
We are announcing the following key points from our roadmap and you can expect to hear more as we progress.
- Dedicated private cloud and hybrid offerings to fulfil every need
- Upcoming network features making our private networking even better
- Architectural upgrades to speed up management operations
- New storage options for demanding use cases
So read ahead as we share about the things you can look forward to in 2019 at UpCloud.
Private Cloud
The cloud infrastructure needs of our users often grow immensely as their businesses flourish. For those wishing to ascend beyond the public cloud, we are going to be offering a new, tailor-made solution, Private Cloud! It will encompass just about everything you could hope from cloud infrastructure in an enterprise-grade service.
In the Private Cloud, you can achieve better than hosted bare-metal performance with the flexibility of the cloud. Create your own cloud server plans to distribute the CPU cores and system memory as you see fit. You’ll always have the best possible performance available to go full throttle. No noisy neighbours or worry of disturbing others.
Security is of the utmost importance and one of the cornerstones of our Private Cloud. The dedicated compute hosts allow complete isolation in a virtual data centre. Get your own private corner of the cloud built just for you, no heavy lifting required.
Take advantage of infinitely configurable networking. Build upon our already secure private network or even bring your own IP range. Connect any resources in the public cloud or on-premises seamlessly over redundancy ensured fibre connection.
Sounds great but not quite ready to take the full leap forward? Better yet, enjoy the best of both worlds with a hybrid solution, à la carte style! All of your servers are securely connected through our private network whether on the public or private cloud. Our new Private Cloud is almost ready for the limelight, so make sure to keep your ears open for future announcements.
Software-defined networking
Network connectivity is one of the fundamental building blocks of the internet and the same holds true for the cloud. While networking is often limited by rigid routes and firewall rules, what if you had the freedom to configure the network yourself?
Software-defined networking, or SDN for short, has been one of our most frequently requested features and the wait is soon over! We have been working tirelessly to develop the underlying functionality to empower your cloud networks. And we can’t wait to see all the creative ways you might find to use the new functionality.
Using our SDN features, you’ll be able to create and configure private networking like never before. Shape your private networks to your heart’s content! SDN will also be the basis to enable many other features in the future. Expect to see easy to use load balancing services, fully-configurable floating IPs, and much more. Many of these features are already in the works. As a result, you can expect to hear more in a not very distant future.
Distributed management architecture
Besides the many new features and services coming this year, we’ve also had a major architectural upgrade in the development for quite some time. While the operation latencies in our European data centres have been great across the board, the more remote locations haven’t quite enjoyed the same snappiness. This is soon going to change with an upcoming architecture upgrade!
We are going to be bringing our system operation intelligent closer to the actual server infrastructure with the new distributed management architecture. Instead of the current centralised cloud provisioning system, the most time-sensitive operations will be handled locally. The new approach is going to greatly reduce the operation latency and making deployments even faster in all of our locations.
In practice, you will be seeing improvements to server management operations. For example, the upgrade will speed up the API and control panel operations in Singapore from a couple of minutes to the same extremely quick actions that our fastest data centres are already benefiting from. The new architecture will be deployed soon so stay tuned for future updates in the coming weeks.
Object storage
A real block storage service is often an add-on and a costly option with other providers, some of whom offer only ephemeral storage as standard. However, every server on UpCloud uses block storage by default. Furthermore, thanks to our blazingly fast MaxIOPS storage technology, there are very few others competing even in the same league. But being simply the fastest is still not good enough. That’s why we are going to be taking the next logical step by bringing you more options with the new object storage!
Object storage arranges the blocks of data that make up a file together combined with all of the associated metadata in a single data object. This approach eliminates the need for a hierarchical structure used in traditional file storage. Due to the flat file space, object storage provides exciting possibilities for data analytics. In addition, the ability to store a data object anywhere within a data pool makes object storage technology extremely powerful together with the flexibility of our cloud storage.
Object storage has generally suffered from slower operation speeds compared to block storage systems. However, with the knowledge and expertise from building our class-leading storage technology, we are setting out to break through previous limitations! On top of the advantages of being able to perform custom analytics on data use, the flat address space allows the pool to be easily scaled by simply adding more storage. Even those whose use case might traditionally shy away from object storage will want to give it a try!
More to come
These are already big news but certainly not everything we have in the works. As we progress, some of the milestones might be initially available in limited capacity or location. And while we do not have a strict timetable for the new features, make sure to keep following us for new roadmap announcements on both our blog and social media channels. Also, we always love to hear your ideas and requests for new features and services. So feel free to reach out via email or tweet @UpCloud!
Harry
Any updated on the Object Storage? I can not completely ditch DigitalOcean (yet) because I still use their Object Storage because of very low pricing compared to others.
This article was written in January 2019 and it’s almost end of 2019, so I’m guessing UpCloud has failed to deliver it?
Janne Ruostemaa
Hi Harry, thanks for the question. We are still very much working on bringing out our Object Storage and the year is not over yet :) Stay tuned for further updates.
Roshan
It’s 2020…Is it available yet?
Janne Ruostemaa
Hi Roshan, thanks for the comment. While Object Storage has taken a bit longer than originally expected, we are going to be sharing more quite soon :)