The environment for developing and testing applications is in most cases deployed on virtual servers. It is more secure and convenient than working on personal computers and more economical than using physical servers. We have interviewed ten development team leaders at Serverspace and gathered the top reasons why they choose cloud infrastructure.
- With cloud providers, you can scale server resources along with the expenditure of the work on your projects. In Serverspace, for example, you can change the number of CPUs, the amount of RAM, disk space, and bandwidth.
- Instead of acquiring powerful development hardware and spending time configuring it, you can quickly create ready-to-use servers. Cost-wise, this would be more beneficial than buying physical infrastructure and maintaining it. You can rent more virtual servers at any time or delete those you no longer need.
- You can set up joint access to your project. All team members can work on the project remotely from anywhere in the world, always having access to its control panel. We have previously written about projects here.
- You do not need to use your computer's disk space to store application data, including media, databases, and server backups. Serverspace offers unlimited autoscaling object storage.
- With cloud technologies you save time on server deployment: virtual servers can be created in a few minutes. The average server deployment time in Serverspace is 40 seconds, thanks to the vStack hyper-converged platform. In this article, you can read about how we sped up server creation.
You can read more about development environments and code editors in the previous blog post.
What services do developers use in the Serverspace cloud?
Virtual servers
At Serverspace, VPS server rental is the primary service. You can build servers based on one of two virtualization platforms: VMware or vStack. Let's dive into the details of both platforms.
VMware is a platform that ensures stable operation of servers using the VMware ESXi hypervisor, as well as VMware DRS and High Availability technologies. If hardware fails, these technologies will automatically recover virtual servers and allocate reserved server resources.
Serverspace is an ambassador for the vStack hyper-converged virtualization platform based on open-source technologies. The lightweight bhyve hypervisor provides the creation of high-performance servers within a minute and ensures their stable operation. ZFS file system technology, a part of the FreeBSD OS, features a combination of POSIX and ACID, advanced data protection, efficient compression, native NFSv4 ACLs, behavior and performance tuning options, and intelligent two-level caching (ARC).
Using vStack technologies made it possible to deploy servers faster, now they can be deployed in 40 seconds. Powerful performance is delivered by 3.1GHz Intel Xeon Gold processors and high IOPS SSDs with triple data replication. The guaranteed number of IOPS for storage is 30 IOPS per 1 GB SSD, 0.1 IOPS per 1 GB SATA at a 32 KB block size.
Kubernetes
Since application deployment processes have changed significantly in recent years and containerization has spread, we have implemented the Serverspace Managed Kubernetes service. Kubernetes service keeps applications running smoothly by distributing data across multiple nodes. Applications work even if some system components are not available.
To work with highly loaded systems, we recommend enabling a High Availability cluster with three master nodes. It can withstand the failure of any component of the application and keeps the infrastructure available, it can also be upgraded without downtime. Load balancing and traffic routing are configured using the ingress controller.
With Serverspace Managed Kubernetes, you can deploy your project without caring about infrastructure maintenance. Your projects will stay available when scaling as the load increases. You can run GitLab components and let Kubernetes host the crucial services that keep your application running.
Application data storage
To store any data in the cloud, you can use unlimited autoscaling object storage. You can manage data using the web interface of the Serverspace panel or desktop applications, such as CyberDuck. The major advantage of object storage is that its great scaling allows you to work with terabytes of information. You can easily migrate existing projects to Serverspace due to the compatibility of the storage with S3 and Swift protocols. Triple data replication guarantees data protection from external threats.
Infrastructure management tools
To help you automate infrastructure management, Serverspace has released API and CLI tools.
CLI is a command-line interface, a program that accepts input as commands that are executed on a device. Using a set of commands, you can manage your virtual machines, networks, and SSH keys, just like in the control panel.
The API provides secure management of your Serverspace control panel using HTTP requests. You can integrate the API with your applications, scripts, and services.
Terraform allows you to safely and efficiently create and modify your cloud infrastructure. You can manage it in a declarative language that is easy to read. When launched, Terraform recognizes the code using the plugins of the provider and brings the infrastructure to the described state. The Serverspace Terraform provider has recently been verified by HashiCorp.
Customized Applications
Fast application deployment helps developers save time on configuring these apps. We actively develop our catalog of customized applications for developers and system administrators. You can already order the Cloud VPN service, which provides a virtual server with pre-installed SoftEther VPN software.
Control Panel
You can use the intuitive control panel interface with a minimum level of knowledge in system administration and cloud technologies. Developers can quickly start working on their projects. As the control panel is a SPA, all its pages and elements load instantly.
For the development process, it is important to work in a team. In Serverspace, you can add members to your project and assign roles with different access rights. To protect your project from intruders, enable two-factor authentication for each account that has access to your project.
Develop any application in the cloud
Use the Serverspace cloud to experiment, test hypotheses, and create cool projects. To help you set up your server at the OS level, we continually update our tutorials section with detailed instructions, code samples, and a glossary of key terms.