It was a busy time last week for Virtuozzo, as the company attended CloudFest, where they had a couple of keynote addresses at the show, addressing the topic of "cloud for all." And they also announced some partnership news as well.
To find out more, VMblog spoke with Joe Morgan, VP
of Cloud at Virtuozzo.
VMblog: Tell us about CloudFest and
why Virtuozzo was there. We understand you had several keynote addresses at the
show?
Joe Morgan: CloudFest is kind of a crazy
event, I've been a couple of times now. It takes place in beautiful countryside
in the middle of nowhere at Germany's answer to Disneyland... We were a Platinum
Sponsor this year, and it's a great place to do networking, catch up with
customers, hopefully meet some new ones, and they always have some really
interesting keynote speakers!
We ran a couple of masterclasses
on WordPress and Containers, and I spoke about the future of cloud, which was
an interesting experience. We also had a guest keynote from the CTO of Miss
Group, Petter Lund, who talked about their project with Virtuozzo to optimize
their entire hosting infrastructure.
VMblog: We note the news announcement
last week about your relationship with Miss Group. How are you working with
Miss Group, and what kind of virtualization solutions are involved? Can you
provide more insight into this new partnership?
Morgan: Like a lot of big hosting
groups, Miss Group has acquired a lot of smaller hosting companies, something
like 24 in the last 3 years, and the result is that they have many different
virtualization platforms to manage. Proxmox, OpenStack, OpenVZ, VMware, you
name it.
For those brands selling
mass-market hosting, shared and VPS hosting, it's really a high volume, low
margin kind of game. So what they need is efficiency in their infrastructure.
Like, a fanatical approach to efficiency. And that is one of the things we do
at Virtuozzo, with our Virtuozzo Hybrid Server product.
It gives them a fast and
ultra-efficient container and VM hosting platform. System containers, KVM
virtual machines and software-defined storage, highly tuned to optimize
density, especially RAM and storage, for those shared hosting and VPS hosting
services. So what they are doing is gradually replacing all of those other mass
market hosting platforms, with Virtuozzo - and doing that enables them to save
between 30 % and 50%. It's exciting!
VMblog: Can you tell us more about
the different parts of the Virtuozzo portfolio, who uses them and why?
Morgan: Virtuozzo solutions enable
various kinds of as-a-service, for service providers. That includes hosting
service providers like Miss Group, as I mentioned. For infrastructure as a
service, we have created a production-ready OpenStack cloud platform called
Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure. So we have CSPs and MSPs using that to sell
private cloud, public and hybrid cloud hosting, as well as
Kubernetes-as-a-Service, Desktop-as-a-Service, backup and DR as a service. Our
customers find it's a much easier and cost-effective alternative than trying to
build the platform themselves, or sell cloud based on something like Nutanix or
VMware.
And, we have our Platform as a
Service solutions, too. They are based on application containers and enable
providers to service the world of DevOps and SaaS, companies that need database
as a service, Magento as a service, and applications like WordPress -
super-scalable, with automatic clusterization, integration with CI/CD
workflows, and true usage-based pricing (which you don't get with AWS).
VMblog: Tell us more about your
solutions for WordPress hosting?
Morgan: Our WordPress solution is really
cool. When it comes to hosting a WordPress site, for a customer, you only have
two options. You can do it the old-fashioned way, with a cPanel shared hosting
setup, maybe a VPS.
That's fine for small projects,
but if you're building a business on WordPress you need more scale and
automation, more security, multi-region, CDN, clustered topologies... you can get
that from the large managed WordPress hosts, but it gets expensive fast. Until
now, there has been no middle option. So, what we've built is an easy way for
web hosts to offer a premium WordPress hosting service, with all of those
features, and do it at half the cost of the big managed WordPress
providers.
VMblog: What was the big takeaway
from this year's CloudFest conference?
Morgan: Meeting with our partners is
absolutely crucial, being able to discuss their wants and needs and what
they're seeing in the market. CloudFest is a great place to do that. It's also
about the knowledge being shared here. All of the speakers added a tremendous
amount of value to everyone in the industry, and you can hear how to solve that
problem you have, that you didn't realize everybody else had as well.
VMblog: What's next on the agenda for
Virtuozzo this year?
Morgan: This is actually what I was
speaking about in our keynote. There is a huge need, and a huge opportunity for
service providers to be able to compete at the same level and the same scale as
the hyperscalers, the big public cloud providers. Why is that? It's so that the
Internet is the democracy it was always meant to be, and independent service
providers have a voice, a seat at the table, and can make money. So that end
customers have a choice, they can get cloud services that are easy, and
affordable, and accessible from any local provider, not just two or three
faceless corporations. And the way we're doing that is empowering all of our
partners to work together, to be successful in selling cloud services.
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