My employer, the biggest Swiss server hosting company, Infomaniak, has just opened registration for its new IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) OpenStack-based public cloud. Well, in fact, it’s been opened since a week or so. Previously, it was only in beta (during that beta period, we hosted (for free) the whole Debconf 21 infrastructure). Nothing really new in the market, except that it is by far cheaper than most (if not all) of its (OpenStack-based or not) competitors, including AWS, GCE or Azure.
Also, everything is hosted in Switzerland, in our own data centers, where data protection is written in the law (and Infomaniak often advertises about data privacy: this is real here…).
Not only Infomaniak is (by far…) the cheapest offer in the market (including a 300 CHF free tier: enough for our smallest VM for a full year), but we also have very good technical support, and the hardware we used is top notch:
- 6th Gen NVMe (read intensive) Ceph-based block devices
- AMD Epyc CPU (128 threads per server)
- 2x 25Gbits/s (using BGP-to-the-host networking)
Some of our customers didn’t even believe how we could do such pricing. Well, the reason is simple: most of our competitors are simply really overpriced, and are making too much money. Since we’re late in the market, and that newer hardware (with many cores on a single server) makes is possible to increase density without too much over-commit, my bosses decided that since we could, we would be the cheapest! Hopefully, this will work as a good business strategy.
All of that public cloud infrastructure has been setup with OpenStack Cluster Installer for which I’m the main author, and that is fully in Debian. All of this is running on a plain, unmodified Debian Bullseye (well, with a few OpenStack packages a little bit more up-to-date, but really not much, and all of that is publicly available…).
Last, choosing the cheapest and best offer is also a good action: it promotes OpenStack and cloud computing in Debian, which I believe is the least vendor locked-in IaaS solution.