Cloud&Heat Technologies, formerly known as AoTerra, combines two different businesses. It sells hardware that utilizes the excess heat of computers to provide warm water and heating to the buildings it resides in. The sold clusters run in commercial and residential buildings all across Germany and altogether comprise the Cloud&Heat cloud.
On one hand the talk will give a short overview of the challenges we faced while building and especially operating this highly distributed cloud. On the other hand we would like to show advantages of having a highly geo-distributed cloud environment. For both sides we would like to show how we used Openstack to form our solutions.
The challenges are along the lines of:
- unified monitoring of distributed deployments
- distributed authentication
- distributed metering, aggregation
Possible advantages are along the lines of:
- higher fault-tolerance of applications spanning multiple geo-distributed deployments (+ giving examples – e.g. of a PaaS)
- higher security, due to a physical separation small single deployments (one deployment per customer)
- more flexibility with regards to deployment configurations (hardware and software) → moving towards private and later hybrid clouds
