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If you’re here, it’s likely that you’ve heard by now the announcement of our new Infrastructure-as-a-Service hosting product, OpenCloud. If not, check out the Press Release here!
The purpose of this post is to tell the story of OpenCloud and our customer lead development process, as well as to queue up a blog series which will cover key areas of interest related to OpenCloud, such as overall platform architecture, performance, security/compliance, and more.
As you read this post, you may be curious about US Signals’ overall cloud strategy due to our wide array of options. I recommend checking out John White’s blog about the strategy, which focuses squarely on the multi-cloud future.
We first began working on what would become OpenCloud back in January 2024, as rumors spread about price increases in the virtualization space. At the time, the facts and data were somewhat opaque, but we knew change was coming.
The truth is that virtualization platform price increases were the trigger of the project, but John White (COO), Pat Cannon (CTO), Daven Winans (VP of Engineering) and I discussed this likelihood months prior in John’s office, as we imagined what the future of cloud would be.
At the time, we had some differences on the exact solution, but unequivocally agreed that the hybrid future needed to include a more flexible option beyond what traditional Private Cloud providers (of which we are one!) could offer. Ultimately, the vision was to combine the best of what our customers love about Private and Public Cloud models – without the downsides.
In February 2024, Engineering and Product temporarily took two paths:
In February 2024, the Customer Advisory Board met at our Grand Rapids HQ, consisting of both Managed Services Providers and SMB to Enterprise organizations in healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing. As it relates to cloud hosting, the feedback from that half-day session was that they cared most about:
No concern for:
As we took input from the CAB into continued testing and development, CloudStack on KVM emerged as the clear front-runner. To validate this, we brought in 5 customers – some of them members of that very same Customer Advisory Board – into a 4-week Beta test over the course of July and August.
In the end, Beta feedback informed our decision to ditch the commercial options - which were subject to the same future price increases we and our customers were already experiencing - and lacked the true cloud like consumption options - and embrace Open Source as the way. Thus, OpenCloud was born.
Flexible consumption is something Public Cloud providers have long excelled at, and no doubt it’s part of their rise to ubiquity. You can “swipe” a credit card and immediately begin consuming services, without the need for involvement by the hosting provider. And when you need more, you don’t need to ask for permission - you just do.
To meet our customers where they are, we will initially offer 2 ways to consume OpenCloud:
Customers may also mix and match - if there are workloads that are more static by nature, committing to those resources upfront can make sense for the dollar savings. At the same time, we recognize that businesses today require the ability to be dynamic, so customers can always provision resources above their commitment and choose whether that resource need is temporary (billed at month-to-month rates) or needed longer-term (coterminous adjustment at any time).
And, of course, you will always have access to US Signals’ US-based Technical Operations Center, where you’ll get a real human who can help in 30 seconds or less.
US Signal customer and beta program participant Bill McCord, Vice President of Service at Estes Group, says, " As a hosting partner with US Signal, it's refreshing to see such energy put into finding a suitable replacement for VMware, given such a market shake-up. Clearly, US Signal is working to return to pre-Broadcom pricing for their services, and this step goes a long way toward recovering."
Next week, you will see a blog from Alex Dietrich, the lead R&D engineer on the OpenCloud project, detailing how we engineered excellence into the platform as a fundamental tenant. You will learn about OpenCloud’s underlying infrastructure, software ecosystem, user interface, APIs, and more!
Ready to see OpenCloud in action? Schedule a demo today!
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