Cloudwatt
Bringing OpenStack Innovation through Enterprise-class Cloud

Today, OpenStack has a growing range of enthusiastic practitioners and advocates. However, the platform is lacking real leadership, as CIOs need to plan deployments years ahead and ensure that they eliminate future risks by choosing the right solution and vendors. This is where Cloudwatt, headquartered in France, decided to take open source from the trunk, package it, test it through Continuous Integration (CI) strategy, bringing OpenStack innovation to the market. “When we founded Cloudwatt in 2012, through OpenStack platform, we interacted with the community to test, validate, patch patterns and make them work effectively,” begins Didier Renard, President and CEO, Cloudwatt.

Created to deliver value for organizations, Cloudwatt’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is based on providing core OpenStack components such as Nova, Glance, Cinder, Neutron, and Swift. The company delivers a plethora of services to help organizations create innovative applications through fully orchestrated cloud functionality and Application Program Interfaces (API).

To explicate, Cloudwatt helps to launch cloud servers in less than a minute, via Nova API, along with the assistance from large 16vCPU, 104 GB RAM and 350 GB SSD disks. “Through OpenStack Nova API, we deliver cloud services with rapid instantiations,” remarks Renard. Providing on-demand persistent block storage in standard class, up to 500 iops, or performant class, up to 2500 iops, OpenStack Cinder API offers snapshots capability and backup to Swift functionality. This is also supplemented by mechanisms to take snapshots of live server instances for cloning, transferring or creating backup for recovery, through Glance API, which gives the option to store, private, Linux, and Windows images in the stack. Furthermore, virtual private cloud, virtual networks, sub-networks, routers, load balancer as a service and floating IP are delivered using OpenStack Neutron API. Neutron modules also handle security groups to filter ports and install firewalls.

Additionally, Cloudwatt has launched an online object storage services based on swift API with the support of OpenStack S3 API. The object Storage services deliver 3x redundant, low cost, high durability storage capability.

Through OpenStack Nova API, we deliver cloud services with rapid instantiations

The service is reachable over internet, delivers high performance and Petabytes scale capacity. “Users can store any kind of file objects such as web pages, multi-media files, tar—whose size can exceed hundreds of GB per file, using multi-part storage option,” says Renard. Swift object store offers multiple features like static site hosting, storage privacy container control, metadata, creation of temporary link for downloading a file. As result, an ecosystem of solutions for synch’ and share, for secured/encrypted file transfer, backup to cloud, big data lake can be achieved through partnering with Cloudwatt.

Essentially, Cloudwatt‘s services are built in privacy and resiliency in compliance with French and European legislation and regulation requirements, differentiating them with other cloud providers. The company is a subsidiary of the Orange Group—a French multinational telecommunications corporation—and has gained plaudits for providing innovative data storage and computing solutions with a strong focus on security, transparency, reversibility, data location and associated cost. For instance, DINSIC, the French government IT department selected Orange Business Services—whom Cloudwatt is a subsidiary of, to accelerate their digital transformation. DINSC used Cloudwatt’s cloud facilities and dual-sites infrastructures which proved to be a key element in enhancing their operations.

Having an illustrious vision for future, the company is launching PaaS and container services to enrich its application store with the support on-boarding of software editors using the factory, to deploy bare metal as a service and pursue network-function virtualization (NFV) feature set. “Cloudwatt is also aiming at expanding its services offering throughout Europe as a sovereign European cloud,” concludes Renard.