Move into the Cloud

We hinted at it earlier this year, but now it is official: we are moving our hosting infrastructure, and with it our customers' virtual datacenters, to the cloud. How did this come about? What exactly does it mean?

For several years we have been hosting on our own hardware in Green's data center in Lupfig, in our own racks, on our own infrastructure based on CentOS, oVirt and Gluster. However, we will shut down this infrastructure by 2022-12-31. The main reasons are:

• Following the current trend, we have lost some hosting customers who have moved to the big American hosting providers.
• We would have to invest in new hardware at the end of the year, which is simply no longer financially viable.

The good news is that we now offer multi-cloud management.

Welcome to the multi-cloud era. 🙂

Over the past few months, we have put a lot of effort into research and development in the area of cloud computing. With multi-cloud, we are much more flexible: for example, we can run test infrastructures with a low-cost provider like Hetzner in Germany and confidential prod systems with a Swiss provider. The providers can be selected according to various aspects, depending on cost, confidentiality, performance, etc. We have far more options for sizing the machines and can scale much further and higher than in our physically limited infrastructure. New features like object storage (S3, Swift), GPUs, or geo-redundancy across multiple vendors are now possible at a lower cost.

As a result, we have entered into partnerships with various Swiss providers. Criteria: Business focus and an API.

Technically, nothing changes for you as a customer:

• We rebuild your infrastructure at other locations and migrate the data.
• We also clean up at the same time: The latest software stack is used (e.g. migration from CentOS to Rocky).
• The new machines will be set up consistently and automatically, as usual with LFOps.
• You benefit from (mostly) lower hosting costs and (always) new possibilities.
• We take care of your infrastructure as usual.

In a nutshell: Of course we still host – just not on our own hardware, but "on someone else's computer".