case study
Hidora automates DevOps cloud with Virtuozzo Application Platform
Hidora is a Swiss cloud provider that helps companies combine DevOps philosophy with cloud hosting. Hidora launched in 2016, and now works with companies across Switzerland and the DACH region to transform their development and application lifecycles.
“I founded Hidora to improve the developer experience,” says CEO Matthieu ROBIN .
“For companies developing software, whether they are working on premises or in the cloud, they have development teams, and they have infrastructure teams, and those teams are separated. That’s a problem because it creates a disconnect between the needs of the application, the needs of the developer and the needs of the business.”
Hidora’s service was designed to solve this problem with cloud hosting in a fully automated way: providing a platform that simplifies application development and hosting for all stakeholders in a project. The newly founded company set about looking for a suitable technology platform to make that a reality.
“We wanted to build a platform that we could use to automate the DevOps philosophy with CI/CD, security, A/B testing, deployment and infrastructure, as a single service,” says Matthieu. “With Virtuozzo Application Platform and our expertise, we created the perfect solution.”
Virtuozzo Application Platform
Virtuozzo Application Platform is a streamlined, containerized cloud application hosting platform designed for DevOps. It enables Platform as a Service with built-in autoscaling, auto-clustering, multi-region and multi-cloud support, and integration with CI/CD development workflows.
“The first thing that attracted us to the Virtuozzo platform was that it is designed for the DevOps way of working,” says Matthieu. “There’s a simple interface for everybody. A developer can deploy a single server, Node.JS for example, or a complex cluster in just a few clicks, or via API or CLI. They don’t need to understand the underlying infrastructure.”
“Meanwhile, a highly skilled system administrator who wants to customize the infrastructure, they can do that in the same platform, and then enable infrastructure deployment to be automated so it’s easy for developers.”
Hidora now uses Virtuozzo Application Platform to host a wide range of services at datacenters in Geneva and Vaud, in Switzerland.
“With Virtuozzo Application Platform we can host Kubernetes as a Service, Docker as a Service, middleware as a service, Database as a Service, Blockchain as a Service, Elastic.stack and much more. We have enterprise private cloud clients, we do a lot of infrastructure as code with Git integration, and of course we have some customers who just want basic Linux and Windows virtual machines. It’s an extremely flexible platform.”
Matthieu ROBIN
CEO, Hidora
To K8s, or not to K8s?
While Virtuozzo Application Platform enables Hidora to offer various Kubernetes hosting services, for many projects the complexity of Kubernetes is not always needed.
“Kubernetes is the hot topic in cloud native applications, and we have clients for whom we provide managed Kubernetes hosting. Their developers can focus on development and we take care of the infrastructure, and that’s great because the company can focus on its business,” says Matthieu.
“However, we often talk to clients who start by asking for Kubernetes hosting, who actually have much less complex requirements. Kubernetes is complex and time-consuming to maintain, and there is quite a steep learning curve for developers. For most deployments we can deliver the same benefits with Platform as a Service using Virtuozzo Application Platform.”
Helping companies adopt DevOps best practice
Helping customers identify the best practice approach to their hosted infrastructure is a central part of the Hidora service. According to Matthieu, many customers come to Hidora after trying to replicate their on-premises environment in a public cloud, which is not likely to deliver the benefits the business is looking for.
“We see customers trying to move their on-premises VMware or Citrix environments to cloud without changing the architecture. Whether it’s a Linux or Windows sysadmin they tend to take the same approach, let’s plan a 1:1 migration of the infrastructure,” explains Matthieu.
“That’s a problem, because while you’ll get the cloud benefits of not having to manage the hardware, and having one invoice and so on, you’re not thinking about the architecture and how the company can benefit from the Cloud philosophy.”
Platform as a Service for DevOps
According to Matthieu, the separation between infrastructure and development has created a lot of the problems that Hidora now solves with Platform as a Service based on Virtuozzo.
“We saw a lot of movement from virtual machines to Docker on Docker Swarm or Kubernetes. Now everybody is on Kubernetes and trying to deal with very complex maintenance, which is very expensive in terms of time and money. And this is driving the shift towards development-centric, application-centric platform as a service, so they are not spending time and money on activities that don’t add value to the business and the end customer.”
“This is where Virtuozzo Application Platform fits perfectly, because now we can provide Platform as a Service with the infrastructure designed for the whole application development and deployment lifecycle,” he says. “I can choose my stack, my load balancer, my database, configure the correct security and cluster topology, and automate that deployment. At the same time we can do Docker, and if you really need a Kubernetes cluster, you can do that too. Everything on the same platform, the same interface, the same invoice, the same account management, the same security level”
Fair & flexible billing
One of the most compelling benefits of Virtuozzo Application Platform, for Hidora customers, is its true usage-based billing model.
“Typical cloud pricing is based on reserved instances, and you pay for all of the resources in your instance, whether you use them all or not. The Virtuozzo billing model is different, and we can give truly fair, consumption-based pricing to customers.”
Matthieu gives the example of a customer using Hidora infrastructure for an ERP system, where month-end is the only time the company needs to ramp up consumption of resources.
“They have up to 20 people connected to the system during office hours, but don’t consume resources overnight or during the weekend,” he says. “The exception is at the end of the month, when they need to do a lot of financial reporting, salary runs and so on. At that point they need 12 CPUs and 32GB RAM per server, and of course their bill increases during that time – but they don’t pay for resources they don’t need, during the rest of the month.”
Service efficiency
Hidora now enables PaaS for 650 customers, including one of the biggest news websites in Switzerland, Non-Government Organizations, public organizations, IoT startups, banking and insurance companies, elastic search applications and large digital agencies. Using Virtuozzo has helped Hidora create an extremely efficient operation.
“We have five technical specialists, two part-time employees and just nine people in total – and we continue to grow,” says Matthieu. “We can do this because our Virtuozzo infrastructure is stable and enables us to automate DevOps best practice in terms of infrastructure creation and deployment. And also, because our approach with customers is to help them learn those best practices, so they rarely need support.”
PaaS for the future
Hidora has grown steadily with Virtuozzo and sees this partnership continue to support its future growth. The company is already investigating expansion into new regions.
“We’ve had a strong partnership with the Virtuozzo team and technology for more than six years now. We have a great relationship with support, they are highly skilled and always willing to listen to our customer requests to help improve the platform. We’re looking forward to bringing the true DevOps philosophy to new clients and Virtuozzo Application Platform will keep playing a central role in our mission,” Matthieu concludes.
For more information about Hidora’s DevOps cloud hosting services, visit https://hidora.io/
