CROC Cloud
In this article:
CROC Cloud#
CROC Cloud (CROC Cloud Platform) provides infrastructure services (Infrastructure as a Service, IaaS) and is an in-house development of the CROC Incorporated company. The cloud platform is deployed in CROC data centers and is used to provide PaaS (Platform as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions.
The CROC Cloud infrastructure is protected from unauthorized access, attacks and other security incidents and complies with the requirements of Federal Law “On Personal Data” No. 152-FZ to the first level of protection for personal data processing.
What services CROC Cloud provides?
Virtual Machines and Volumes#
Compute resources in CROC Cloud are represented as Virtual machine instances, or just Instances. You can choose Availability Zone (data center in which physical hardware is located), quantity and performance of virtual central processing units (vCPU), RAM size and many other parameters during an instance creation process.
Volume in CROC Cloud is the main storage for instance data. Volumes are virtual block storage devices. You can create a volume separately from an instance or when creating the instance. The Cloud provides users with several volume types differing in characteristics, capabilities, and cost. In CROC Cloud, you can create volume snapshots and use them as references for creating new volumes or as a data backup.
Launch templates save instance configuration information and help reduce the number of steps and actions to create instances. In particular, launch templates are used to describe the configuration of instances in the Auto Scaling service. For each launch template, you can create its versions with different instance parameters.
You can import virtual machines, as well as available volumes from an existing infrastructure to CROC Cloud and export them back to a local virtualization infrastructure, using the service Import/Export.
Dedicated host is a physical server provisioned only to a particular user (company) — no one else can run instances on it. The user can choose the server configuration: the number of available physical cores, sockets, and RAM. Different instance types can be run on the same server.
You can assign individual tags to any instance or volume. Tags help identify and organize multiple resources of the same type easier and faster and manage them more conveniently. You can tag both existing and new instances and volumes, search for these resources, and filter them by tags.
Networks#
CROC Cloud allows you to create virtual private clouds (VPC), which ensure virtual resource isolation at the network layer. As part of a private cloud, Subnets, instances created in the subnet, DHCP options, Routing tables, and VPN- connections are created. CROC Cloud allows you to create instances connected to Subnets or several subnets that are present in one of the availability zones. Network access in the Cloud Platform is managed with the help of Security Groups and Access Control Lists. CROC Cloud provides External IP addresses and the possibility to use your own provider-independent IPv4 address blocks. In addition, External networks allow you to connect your physical equipment located in any of CROC data centres to virtual infrastructure in the cloud.
Object Storage#
Object Storage CROC Cloud is designed for storing large volumes of arbitrary data (documents, backups, etc.) and has an Amazon S3-compatible API. All objects are distributed among containers — Buckets. Bucket can be used to keep backup copies or data available over the Internet via HTTP. Static websites, available via HTTPS, and Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) can also be configured in the bucket.
Auto Scaling#
The Auto Scaling service allows you to automatically run the required number of virtual machine instances to support the current application workload. You can create both groups where the number of instances is fixed and groups where it can change depending on the load. Health check mechanisms ensure that new instances are launched to replace failed ones, while scaling policies add/terminate instances to/in the group upon specified alarms.
Load balancing#
Load Balancing service automatically distributes inbound traffic across a group of instances in one or more availability zones. CROC Cloud supports Network Load Balancers (NLB), which operate at the fourth OSI layer and distribute TCP or UDP traffic. Depending on your goals, you can create different types of balancers:
external, to distribute inbound Internet traffic;
internal, to distribute intra-VPC traffic.
Transit gateways#
Transit gateways allow you to organize traffic exchange between different VPCs. A transit gateway can be accessed from other projects, so these gateways can be used to provide connectivity between subnets in different projects, even when they are owned by different companies.
Thanks to flexible routing based on transit gateways, you can create complex network topologies from multiple VPCs, where each VPC can act as a separate security zone. If necessary, dedicated VPCs can host infrastructure for traffic inspection, filtering, and/or additional processing.
DNSaaS#
DNSaaS provides DNS zone hosting functionality. It allows you to create and administer DNS zones and resource records within them. CROC Cloud supports both public and private DNS zones and ensures high availability and scalability of the service.
PaaS#
PaaS allows you to quickly deploy cloud resources with the necessary infrastructure and software.Currently, Databases, Caching, Message Brokers and Search and Analytics services are available and supported in the PaaS section.
The following DBMS are available for deployment in the Databases category MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, and MongoDB. You can run both standalone databases and high-availability database clusters.For MySQL and PostgreSQL, and MongoDB, you can create an arbitrator-enabled cluster to ensure the required fault tolerance level and save on cloud resources.
In the Caching category, there are two of the most popular caching solutions available — Memcached and Redis. They are deployed in memory and reduce response times for database queries, e-commerce sessions, streaming analytics and other types of transactions.
It takes just a few minutes to deploy and configure the popular service Elasticsearch in the Search and analytics category.
In the Message brokers category, you can find a popular open-source message broker RabbitMQ. It features asynchronous message exchange and delivery mechanisms and supports a wide range of protocols to help you create flexible and scalable systems.
The Monitoring category offers Prometheus service based on a popular open-source monitoring system. It allows for an easy integration of PaaS services deployed in CROC Cloud into a single monitoring system. In addition, you can add your own services to the monitoring system.
The Logging category offers ELK service based on ELK stack. Elasticsearch is used to store and index the logs; Logstash, to filter and process logs; and Kibana, to visualize received data. The service allows for the centralized and automated log data collection from other PaaS services deployed in CROC Cloud. As with PaaS monitoring service, you can connect your own services to the logging system.
Kubernetes Clusters#
Service Kubernetes clusters allows you to launch clusters, scale worker nodes, and delete launched clusters. When creating a cluster in CROC Cloud, you can install additional services:
Ingress controller, which can be used to route all requests, coming from outside to applications, deployed in Kubernetes.
EBS-provider, which allows Kubernetes to manage volumes in CROC Cloud and use them as Persistent Volumes.
Docker Registry configured for use in Kubernetes. You can safely store your images in the registry before deploying it in Kubernetes.
Monitoring#
CROC Cloud Monitoring service allows users to monitor instance operation and metrics and set up alarms for events. The service is available in the Cloud Platform web interface and via CloudWatch API.
Activity Log#
Activity Log allows you to store and explore records about actions (API requests) made by all company users. The service is available via the cloud web interface and CloudTrail API.
Identity providers#
The Identity providers service lets you to centrally manage users through an external identity provider. Integrated with the IAM service, it allows you to control access to cloud resources without configuring privileges for every user. Authentication and authorization in CROC Cloud can be performed through an external identity provider using its login and password.
Hope you enjoy your CROC Cloud experience!