Virtual Private Cloud: Scheduled Snapshots and Other Updates
We’re excited to tell you all about the latest innovations and updates to our Virtual Private Cloud.
Custom Projects (White Labeling)
The VPC now gives you control over your projects’ external control panel, letting you add your company name and logo and change the panel background color. This should prove particularly interesting for resellers.
Projects can be assigned a CNAME, which is a third level domain that redirects to the project control panel.
In addition to custom links, you can also upload an image (logo) and set the background color in the control panel.
Projects can be customized individually or default parameters can be set to modify multiple projects at once.
You can read more about configuring projects in our knowledge base.
Automated Cloud Operations
Scheduled Screenshots
The system now allows you to automatically create volume backups.
In the control panel, you can schedule automatic snapshots for volumes.
The panel lets you set how frequently snapshots are made and the maximum number of snapshots that can be stored. For more information, please visit our knowledge base.
Deleting Linked Objects
The VPC handles two kinds of object links:
- Servers to volumes
- Volumes to snapshots
When previously managing the VPC from the control panel, volumes could only be deleted after all of the snapshots had been deleted.
For example, to completely delete a virtual machine with three volumes, each with 20 snapshots, every snapshot had to be deleted manually. Only then could you delete the volumes and machine.
Now you can create a delayed task for deleting machines with linked volumes. This is performed by the Minstral cloud service; it finds all of the volumes attached to the machine and deletes the snapshots one by one. Afterwards, the actual volumes and machine get deleted.
Volumes with snapshots are deleted the same way, with a delayed task.
More information can be found in our knowledge base.
Inter-Project Networks
It’s now possible to extend virtual networks between projects.
In the control panel, we’ve introduced an interface for managing virtual network access with an RBAC (role-based access control) policy. This can be used to create L2 accessibility between virtual machines in different projects.
Only the project owner can manage subnets in the general network, but ports for virtual machines can be created in all of the projects the network extends to.
The backend mechanism for this has been available for a long, since the release of Liberty. It’s the logical development of one of the most basic network access systems: a ‘shared’ flag has been added, which makes the network available to all of the projects in the cloud.
We apply this mechanism to “grey” virtual subnets and public VLAN networks.
More Subnets
There are two options for providing access to virtual machines: a floating IP address and public subnets. Traditionally, floating IP addresses are used for developing and testing services. Floating addresses can be easily transferred between virtual machines and not require and reboots or changes to the interface.
From a technical perspective, public subnets are built differently. This is a separate VLAN with a /29 subnet: 8 public address, from which 5 are available to the user (the remaining 3 go to the subnet address, router address, and broadcast address). We recommend public subnets for working installations; they offer better performance and reliability since the functionality relies on fewer mechanisms.
Users can now order /24, /25, /26, /27, and /28 subnets. These can be ordered via ticket system.
| Size | Available addresses | Cost, rub./mon. | Cost of 1 address, rub./mon. |
|---|---|---|---|
| /28 | 13 | 759 | 58.4 |
| /27 | 29 | 1351 | 46.6 |
| /26 | 61 | 2570 | 42.1 |
| /25 | 125 | 5023 | 40.2 |
| /24 | 253 | 9922 | 39.2 |
Improved Developer Tools
Ansible Module
Ansible is a software solution for managing configurations. It lets you configure remote machines via SSH.
In the course of using the VPC, users often have to create multiple virtual machines, constantly manage their resources, create new users, etc.
To simplify the initial project configuration and OpenStack API operations, we’ve developed the ansible-selvpc-modules package, which includes several ansible modules specially designed for our service. Anyone who uses our API should consider trying it out.
More information about the ansible-selvpc-modules library can be found in our blog.
Python Library and Console Client
The python-selvpcclient library is designed for comfortably working with Selectel’s VPC API. It is written in Python and covers all of the functions of the API, which lets you manage projects, quotas, and resources from either custom Python applications or the included console harness for using the API from the command line.
You can find more information about the python-selvpcclient library in our blog.
Conclusion
Detailed instructions for using our Virtual Private Cloud can be found in our knowledge base.
Our future plans include:
- Creating a telegram bot for balance notifications
- Developing tools for gathering statistics and metric information on virtual machines
Please leave your suggestions for future VPC developments and functions in the comments below.
We’d be happy to hear your feedback.