Genesis Public Cloud

Images are available for CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, and Windows Server. However, you can create your own images, so any operating system is possible.  Note that you will have access to the VM's console, so you can answer operating system installer questions.  Cloud-init can be installed for supported operating systems which will allow for OpenStack's automation to configure the network and other parameters during VM deployment.

We cover Windows licensing automatically if you deploy one of our Windows images.  Windows activation is performed automatically upon deployment.  Windows licensing will show up as a separate line item on your invoice, and is charged on-demand (metered every 30 seconds).

Our service is metered every 30 seconds and billing is performed at the end of each month (in arrears).

Payments are due on the 1st of each month.

OpenStack is as secure as all of the public cloud platforms.  The platform runs on Linux and uses KVM for a hypervisor.  All of the source code is available and is reviewed extensively on an ongoing basis as well as undergoes development using a well established CI/CD pipeline process.

Encryption in transit and at rest is used for all control plane functions at Genesis.  Tenant volume storage is encrypted at rest with keys stored in encrypted form in Barbican, OpenStack's secrets vault.

When using best practices for application security, including deploying web application firewalls behind OpenStack's load balancers and using appropriate security groups (OpenStack's Layer 3 and 4 filtering at the VM port level), audits can be performed in confidence, including HIPAA, PCI, ISO 27001, and SSAE 18.

For highly sensitive security requirements, we also have a private version of our public cloud service, which includes dedicated servers, storage, and switching, along with a dedicated control plane, so nothing is shared with any other tenant at Genesis.

OpenStack has a volume backup function that will create an inline snapshot of a volume and perform a backup against this snapshot by copying all blocks to the object storage available for your account.  Backups are compressed, so the space required is minimized.

OpenStack includes a Web UI, CLI, REST API, and SDKs for all functions within the platform.

In addition, OpenStack includes an orchestration system called HEAT, which allows clients to launch multiple composite cloud applications based on templates in the form of text files that can be treated like code, very similar to AWS CloudFormations.

OpenStack is also compatible with Terraform.

Yes, but we would need to evaluate the scope of work required for the migration and provide a proposal.

Free free to contact us if you have any questions or would like to discuss options.

We do not charge for the VM itself, but we will charge for public IPs and volumes attached to the VM.

Paused VMs are not considered powered down.  Only powered down (in a "SHUTOFF" state) are not charged.

Yes!  OpenStack provides this as a native function.  The storage for the images is metered every 30 seconds, just like all other resources.

We use a commercial solution for our SSD storage platform which is well over 10x as fast as Ceph, with significantly lower latency, so we use Ceph and some other technologies for spindle-based storage that does not require such high performance.

No - all of our storage is separated from our compute nodes.  All storage is mirrored for redundancy, except for two of our volume types (nr2 and nr3), which are located on non-redundant systems in the case where you need inexpensive temporary storage or want to mirror your own storage across two disk zones (we call the volume types nr2d1 and nr2d2 for disk zones 1 and 2 respectively).  This provides you the benefit of being able to create any-sized volumes (10GiB minimum) for temporary storage that can be unmounted and re-mounted between VMs - unlike local storage.

Genesis meters resources for billing every 30 seconds.

Genesis is typically 20% less than others, and up to 60% less when considering all factors including low data transfer costs, no object storage transaction fees, and the fact that we typically have much higher performance compute, network, and storage.  We invite you to test!

Genesis provides public, private, and on premise solutions with technology consulting.  We have been in the industry for over 20 years and have seen clients make every mistake possible that have can cost them significantly more than any savings they get from using a wholesale infrastructure provider, especially when audits are required.  We often recommend the big 3 public cloud providers for some clients who have workloads that are suitable, but in many cases, we have shown that Genesis’ infrastructure provides a better cost/performance ratio.  Genesis has a wide range of options from very low cost to very high performance.

Genesis has grown its business by catering to clients of all sizes, not by providing wholesale services, rather we provide “solutions” to problems that may or may not include using both Genesis and other public cloud services.  Also, you will see that services beyond IaaS, such as AWS’ DBaaS, are typically priced at a significant premium at the big 3, whereas Genesis only charges for the infrastructure, at standard rates, to run these services.

It depends on your workload, but we have found more users wanting to push data faster and faster due to the distributed nature of cloud applications.  With 100Gbps connectivity, we can also provide much higher throughput for small instances, so it costs our clients less if they simply want higher performance networking, but don’t need the larger VMs that other public cloud providers require.

Shared core flavors configure the hypervisor to run a VM's vCPUs on the best available physical CPU cores.  This has advantages and disadvantages.  An advantage is that vCPUs can run on any physical CPU core, so, for example, with a 2 vCPU VM, the 2 vCPUs might run on different unused cores, gaining a performance advantage over 2 vCPUs running as threads on a single hyper-threaded core.  However, there are security disadvantages due to the fact that cores are shared.  This can result in lower performance on a busy system (many VMs running high CPU workloads).

Dedicated core flavors configure the hypervisor to run a VM's vCPUs on dedicated cores, but also pairs 2 vCPUs to a single hyper-threaded core.  This has some performance disadvantage compared to shared cores on a non-busy system, but will guarantee great performance on a busy system.  It also has security advantages due to the fact that cores are not shared.

It usually takes roughly 10 minutes to provision an OpenStack domain if you choose to deploy the test environment, which includes a test project, router, subnet, floating IP, and a test VM that includes all of the OpenStack tools necessary to manage your account.

If you choose the test environment option during ordering, our system will provision an OpenStack domain which includes a test project, router, subnet, floating IP, and a test VM that includes all of the OpenStack tools necessary to manage your account.

Yes.  Object storage is metered per-GiB/month every 30 seconds.  See our other FAQ on Genesis Storage.

Yes - forward and reverse DNS are supported, so you can configure your public DNS records and respective reverse DNS entries in OpenStack and then point your domain's WHOIS record to our authoritative DNS servers at:

gdns1.genesishosting.com
gdns2.genesishosting.com
gdns3.genesishosting.com
gdns4.genesishosting.com
gdns5.genesishosting.com

If VMs were launched on the same physical server, approximately 0.060ms (60 microseconds).

If VMs were launched on different physical servers, approximately 0.310ms (310 microseconds).

Yes, we support an MTU of up to 9100, so you can easily port applications that require a standard jumbo frame size of 9000, or encapsulate traffic easily without dealing with smaller-than-normal MTU issues.