Cloud Central: Australian for Cloud

Cloud Central

Cloud Central is a Public Cloud offering from Down Under. With public beta program to try out, its worth getting your hands wet with some realtime cloud exposure. And all the feedback from the users will help in building another successful cloud service.

True to the Australian gutsy spirit; Cloud Central has made a bold move to jump in and publish their offering to the public, with a beta program. Cloud Central already promises quite a bit in the Compute arena of the Cloud, though they have a long way to go, knowing very well that they have a niche down under.

Pricing

I hope they have thought through this quite carefully. 3¢/hr- 256M, 16GB, and 1CPU! And have called it “nano”. This is a very competitive pricing model, considering that big daddy’s of the cloud are watching, and working on better offering. But this is definitely competitive pricing, if anyone has to consider hosting a low traffic server on the cloud they would just paying $1 $20 per month.

But $1 $20is not all, thats just for running the instance for a month. Add to that $1.5 for every 1Gig of traffic and $2. So you should be ideally shelling out $4.5 $23.5 for a month. More on the pricing could be found on their pricing page.

Features

All types of instances come with persistent storage. The smallest or the “nano” instance is packed with sufficient 16GB of storage, which is quite large for many tasks of medium size.

A running instance can be stopped anytime, and you could raise it later without any loss of data. This is how the persistence is maintained. But if you choose to delete the instance, God help you. This is a parallel to EBS AMI’s on the Amazon.

All instances are raised with a private IP and are accessible via console using a Java based app through your browser. But to have other remote accesses you need to get a public IP and assign it to your instance. Allow access, ssh/rdp, to it.

The resize feature is neat, which help you jump from one type, say nano, of instance to another type, say small. Though I lost ssh connectivity to my instance the moment i tried it, it would be good feature to have. But there are no reversal of fortunes here, i.e., i cannot down grade.

The root access to all your instances means that you have complete control of your instances. But the only way you get access, if you have forgotten your password, is to “Reset” the password. Its root access after all.

The “Free” limited backup, not completely explained. But the backup of your data on the instance will be a good feature. You do not need to control it, only have subscribe to it so someone else becomes responsible for your loss.

API, though not luanched as yet, is definitely a needed feature these days if you have to sell your offerings/services online. And good to see that they are working towards it.

To top all the features, Xen Cloud Platform is at the helm of things.

Conclusion

Too early to say anything. But the Australian cloud jumper will definitely feel good about the low latency and competitive pricing. There is definitely a lot of work that needs go in terms of, building a strong community, good documentation and an effective management console, to make a mark in this widely open cloud arena.

Cloud Central’s gutsy debut is worthy for applause.