[ubuntu-cloud] Ubuntu cloud use case

[Bruno Girin]

Hi all,

I'm not sure this is the correct list to ask this question so if it's
not, please direct me to the right place.

I work for a startup based in London that offers online energy
efficiency management tools. At the moment, we have everything hosted on
a VPS running Debian in Germany. When I mean everything, it's a
development stack (django + PostgreSQL), a production stack, Jenkins,
JIRA and Sentry instances and all sorts of bits and bobs.

I want to move all this to cloud servers in stages, preferably using
Ubuntu and Juju:

  * Short term: move the production stack to its own cloud server(s) so
    that 1) it's decoupled from dev, 2) I can have hardened production
    servers and 3) it can scale horizontally when required; ideally
    using a Juju charm to deploy the stack;
  * Short to mid term: be able to bring up functional and non-functional
    testing environments on demand (either automated through Jenkins or
    manually): assuming I created Juju charms above, re-use and extend
    them and call Juju from Jenkins;
  * Mid to long term: move the whole development infrastructure to the
    cloud; it works well on a VPS for now but once I have it
    cloud-ified, I should be able to move it anywhere;
  * Long term: world domination (I know, there are simpler plans out
    there to do that but this one suits me).


My first question is: where do I start? First I need a cloud service
provider so what should I look for when I talk to providers in order to
confirm that they can support what I want to do? Is it enough that they
support OpenStack or is there more to it?

Apart from the OpenStack community page [1], are there any resources
where I can find potential providers?

When talking to cloud providers, are there typical add-on services that
are worth paying for and others that aren't?

[1] http://www.openstack.org/community/companies/

Thanks!

Bruno

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