Aruba Cloud Pro: IaaS with Plesk for WordPress
If you plan to develop a particularly complex website destined to receive large amounts of traffic over time, it is necessary to have a technical infrastructure capable of guaranteeing continuity of service, high levels of performance, security and scalability.
These characteristics are typical of a Cloud based service that allows project owners to concentrate on their business, entrusting the complexities relating to hardware and software configurations, their monitoring and maintenance to a partner supplier. To have a reference regarding the current market offer, we will analyze in detail the features of the Aruba Cloud Cloud Pro service, specially designed for the construction of a virtual Data Center, later comparing them with those proposed by a competitor such as AWS (Amazon Web Services).
Technical features of Cloud Pro
Cloud PRO is an IaaS service (Infrastructure as a Service), this means that it allows you to adapt the technical configuration and the performance provided to the demand for resources, paying only for those actually used (pay per use). Its features, and the guarantee of resources, allow the creation of a Cloud infrastructure based on completely redundant hardware which is associated with high-level performance, reliability and scalability.Cloud PRO is a Public Cloud platform with which you can create virtual mini data centers that can be customized in various aspects ranging from server components to networking and storage. VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization solutions also allow you to resize available resources in real time, scaling them according to the extent of current requests.
Cloud PRO infrastructure supports an unlimited amount of traffic , integrates balancers that automatically manage workloads and virtual switches for the connection between multiple servers, manages storage on SSD disks and is present on the marketplace of AgID, the Agency for Digital Italy, as it complies with legal requirements for adoption by Public Administrations and by operators who provide Cloud services to them.
For the reasons listed above, this is an ideal offer to support temporary high traffic peaks (think of a e-commerce during Black Friday) and limit waste of resources in times of low or medium load, develop applications in a secure environment, build infrastructure virtual tures without startup costs, create cloud-based development environments that allow you to keep costs under control. In fact, Cloud Pro does not provide for any activation costs nor are there any charges for data sent or received.
Configuring Cloud Pro
Cloud Pro allows you to configure your virtual Data Center before purchase by immediately providing information on the price that will be paid for the service. This occurs through a special interface that allows you to select:the location of the Data Center, with the possibility of choosing between different Italian locations and those operating in other European countries including France, Germany, United Kingdom, Republic Czech and Poland. the hypervisor: that is, the monitor for virtual machines that can be chosen between VMware and Hyper-V; the operating system: Windows or Linux, both in various versions; the number of virtual CPUs to be activated; the amount of RAM; the space available for storage. The following image shows the configuration from Cloud Control Panel of a Cloud Server Data Center located in Italy with VMware hypervisor:
The Linux operating system and template based on CentOS 7 are then selected .x with 64bit architecture, Plesk Obsidian and WordPress Toolkit, 2 virtual CPUs and 4 GB of RAM and 10GB of storage space.
Unlimited network traffic at 1,000 Mbit / s is always available regardless of the features selected for the Cloud Pro server
The platform allows you to choose from dozens of different templates, both for Linux and for Windows, for the former, configurations are also available, among others based on Ubuntu, Debian, openSuse, FreeBSD and CentOS itself in different variants, for Microsoft's OS we go instead from Windows 2012 up to version 2019, also in this case in various versions.
In the case specific to the previous example, the template sele In addition to the Linux distribution indicated, it also features the Plesk Obsidian Web Hosting Manager with pre-installed WordPress Toolkit, a unified management interface that allows you to install, configure and manage a website based on WordPress.
Cloud Pro and rates
As you can see, at the end of the configuration procedure the system will accurately indicate all the costs foreseen for the use of the service.Tali costs are divided into:
costs at hourly rates: costs related to all resources, such as virtual CPUs, RAM memory and hard disks, which are counted on an hourly basis or by fraction of an hour and which may be due even for a single hour of service use; costs with solar monthly charges: costs that are paid in advance and cover the period of time that passes from the activation of a resource until the end of the month in which it was carried out, these costs regardless of the number of hours of use of the chosen resource and are required by license owners; costs at monthly rates for 30 days: the costs to cover the following 30 days that must be paid in advance to be able to use the selected resources, the latter are calculated regardless of their use and must be paid in advance even using only one hour of service . As you can see, the chosen configuration provides only a certain cost on a monthly basis (38.8 euros) obtained by calculating the price per single hour (0.054 euros) multiplied by 30 days.
Cloud Pro and AWS: a comparison on performance and rates
As anticipated, in order to have a term of comparison between Cloud services, a comparison was made between Cloud Pro of Aruba Cloud with another very popular platform for the implementation of online projects such as AWS. It too bases its operation on on-demand instances that allow you to pay exclusively for the resources used, moreover, there are no additional complexities and costs associated with planning, purchasing and maintaining the hardware equipment.Una AWS configuration comparable to that of Cloud Pro previously proposed is made available by the t3.medium instance of EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). Specifically, the T3 are instances designed for general purposes, have the characteristic of being expandable and provide a basic level of processor performance with the opportunity to expand the CPU usage at any time for the desired time.
On a technical level, a t3.medium instance has 2 Intel Xeon virtual CPUs of 2.5 GHz, 4 GB of RAM, Nitro AWS system (which combines hardware dedicated to a hypervisor), Amazon EBS storage (Elastic Block Store ).
To make a comparison with Cloud Pro, an Amazon EC2 configuration has been set up having as reference region Milan and Linux with SQL server Web as operating system for running a single workload instance constant.
By selecting T3 as the instance type as well as the standard equipment of 2 vCPUs, 4 GB of RAM and up to 5 Gigabit of network performance, you get an on- demand (i.e. calculated based on the capacity processing time consumed per hour for executed instances) equal to $ 0.1155 per hour (€ 0.097 at current exchange rates) higher than € 0.054 per hour for Cloud Pro.
It must be also selected the amount of storage associated with the instance with an additional cost increase of 0.92 dollars (0.76 euros at the current exchange rate) for 10 GB of space.
As shown by image proposed below the estimated monthly price for the desired configuration is equal to 72.31 dollars (59.36 euros at the current exchange rate) against the 38.8 euros required for Cloud Pro.
The comparison Cloud Pro shows be, with the same configuration and with accessory equipment including for example Plesk Obsidian + WordPress Toolkit, a much cheaper solution able to guarantee performance comparable to that of one of the largest global market operators in the Cloud Computing sector .
