AMD EPYC 7003, Open Compute, datacenters & stuff : what’s up Clever Cloud ?

For more than 10 years, Clever Cloud has been working on a different way to think the hosting business, helping developers with only one goal: to keep their applications up and running.

Clever Cloud, it just works

Our offer and the software tools we provide are not simply designed to host code on the Internet, also to automate the daily tasks of the cloud as much as possible and take care of the rest, 24/7, for our customers.

This means keeping the operating system of our servers and their tools up to date in a transparent way, without interruption. But also to adapt the size and number of your instances according to your needs, backup and replicate your data, allow you to deploy your source code with a simple “git push”, monitor everything (logs, Grafana dashboard, etc.), be able to go back and assure you that if there is a problem, you don’t have to do anything, it will be fine.

To do all of this, we have servers in two datacenters in Paris, designed and set up with density in mind. All our deployment tools aim to exploit our servers to the maximum, finding the “sweet spot” to meet the needs of our customers’ applications without wasting resources. 

Energy efficiency is thus at the heart of our practices and our business model, one of the needs we have always had to meet and which leads most of our technical choices.

A successful open, multi-cloud approach

We also have to offer a high level of resilience to keep our customers’ applications running even if we lose a component, a server, a rack or if a datacenter becomes unavailable. 

To reach this goal, we have a diversified and resolutely multi-cloud offering: you can deploy through our services, with third-party cloud providers which are our partners such as OVHcloud and Oracle Cloud, in France or abroad, with different levels of qualification and certification. Some we’ll be announced soon. By the way, we’ll be at the Scaleway’s CTO Forum at Viva Tech this Friday to discuss how our companies are cooperating.

You can also use Clever Cloud on your own, on-premises infrastructure. So even if we’re not operational anymore, you’re still. We can now do it on top of VMware. This openness is very attractive : in recent years we have doubled our revenue every 12 to 18 months.

Nevertheless, we still have room for improvement. We are working on many projects to strengthen our multi-cloud deployment approach, allowing you to manage your disaster recovery plans (DRP) entirely through our services.

Flexibility and openness

And to be even more resilient while anticipating continued business growth, we are moving to a third Parisian site within one of the 2CRSi group’s data centers: GreenData. It will host new AMD EPYC Series 7003 servers as well as several of our research and development (R&D) projects.

We have decided to choose, when possible, servers that meet the Open Compute Project (OCP) standard, which increases the density and convenience of the infrastructure, with a centralized power management that is more energy-efficient.

As a solution which is now used by many players in the market, OCP ensures several life cycles of servers. An open and responsible approach that is crucial for Clever Cloud, which invests in many open source projects. We also initiate them, such as the Sōzu reverse proxy and the Biscuit rights management system.

Preparing for the future

Other data centers will host Clever Cloud servers by 2023-2024. To lead theses projects and structure better, Guillaume Champeau was appointed Director of Legal and Public Affairs, Cédric Biron COO and Steven Le Roux CTO in January, then David Legrand as Chief of Hardware Evaluation. 

Since the beginning of the year, a dozen developers have been recruited in order to accelerate the development of our products and services, whether it be our internal tools, those we make available to you or our Console, which is now evolving regularly. 

Clever Cloud’s team is now about 40 people.

A platform that adapts to your needs

This allows our offer to strengthen. In recent weeks, we have deployed :

• Clever Cloud on SecNumCloud (VMware): to meet the needs of a prospect, we deployed an on-premise Clever Cloud service on the Hosted Private Cloud offer of OVHcloud which is qualified SecNumCloud by the ANSSI, operated via VMware.
• Matomo-as-a-Service : to deploy in a few clicks a turnkey instance based on the open source tool of audience analysis Matomo, allowing a hosting of the data in France and respect of the GDPR.
• Clever Operator: Kubernetes or OpenShift users can continue to use these tools while taking advantage of the powerful features offered by Clever Cloud, such as automatic scalability or monitoring tools.
• Ticket Center: a new contact path for our customers, into the Console, designed using the tools of our French partner Crisp.im
• A new environment variable editor as a Web Component: an essential open standard for our new interfaces. This editor now handles the JSON format (read/write) and integrates with our Config Provider.
• TCP redirects: can be enabled to access applications deployed on Clever Cloud through a protocol other than HTTP(S).

We are currently working on Network groups based on Wireguard, VM Tasks for on-demand execution, scheduled maintenance, FaaS/IaaS offers. But also a set of in-house APIs to abstract from the management of hardware or software components and depend as little as possible on third-party manufacturers and service providers.

Values and projects

If our team has always been organized around distributed, collaborative and remote work, we are also very attached to the values regularly defended by Quentin Adam, CEO and co-founder, in the areas of sovereignty and freedom of choice for users. 

Thus, we make sure that many French companies in the sector work together. We also evaluate their solutions in order to propose them within our offer, like Kalray. Its Coolidge chip and Flashbox storage solution are currently being tested in our infrastructure. Would you like to take advantage of this for your projects? Let us know.

We will tell you about some coming projects in the coming weeks, particularly in the areas of innovation and sovereignty, with some surprises in store…