BYO - Bring Your Own Cloud
BYO (Bring Your Own) is one of those institutions we take for granted. Who wouldn't prefer to enjoy that special bottle of wine you’ve been carefully cellaring all those years, paired with an equally excellent meal at your favourite restaurant, instead of settling for a limited selection from the wine list? Or, more broadly, who doesn't prefer the more convenient option of bringing your own choice of six pack that’s already sitting at home in the fridge.
Recently, the term BYO has been applied to the idea of employees bringing their own devices (BYOD) into the office and is increasingly popular among Aussie big businesses to reduce costs, make systems more user-friendly and attract better staff. Gartner and IDC describe BYOD as rapidly becoming the norm, with implicit transformational effects on business productivity.
Makes sense.
However it struck me as odd, when reading an independent survey published last month, that the term BYO hasn’t really hit the headlines or requirements list for cloud computing. Sure there’s plenty of talk about cloud standards and cloud interoperability but not a whole lot of talk about pure and simple BYO for the cloud.
The independent survey highlighted Ninefold as the only public cloud service provider to offer customers the ability to both import virtual servers into the cloud and export virtual servers out of the cloud — independent of platform. The survey revealed that global players Amazon EC2 and Rackspace, as well as Aussie incumbent Telstra, do not offer this capability. Wow.
If a key benefit of public cloud computing is the ability to quickly and easily spin up (and down) virtual server resources with minimal lock-in, then the ability to import your existing virtual server from an existing environment into the cloud should be a pretty fundamental cloud requirement. No need to start from scratch — leverage the virtual server image you’ve already invested time and money in. Much quicker and easier. Not to mention a whole lot less risky. And when you’re finished with the cloud, simply export the virtual server (with all its data) out again.
Within the walls of Ninefold, in true Australian style, we’ve been calling this BYO (Bring-Your-Own) Virtual servers for a while now. But after reading the survey, we’re gonna start taking the language to the street. Customers use this feature regularly and we’ve seen many a Xen or VMware virtual server image converted and imported into the Ninefold cloud.
Here’s how to do it..
To import:
- Use the “Create Template” feature available in the Ninefold self service portal (or via the Ninefold API). Point to an existing virtual server VHD file and import (via HTTP URL or via SneakerNET).
- Then create a “New Virtual Server” (or as many virtual servers as you want) using your new custom template.
To export:
- Just stop the virtual server, select the Disk Volume and click “download volume”. A URL is provided to download the virtual server image in VHD format.
- The only exception on exporting VM images from the Ninefold cloud is if the Ninefold template/image includes a license key provided by Ninefold; such as Microsoft Windows. Exporting such images is not permitted.
Give it a go. Or contact our awesome support team to give you hand.
Interestingly, Wikipedia suggests BYO in restaurants first appeared in Australia in the 1960’s. And it seems BYO for the cloud may also start out down under...