Today I got invitation from HPCloud to test cloud services for free. I want to see if HP Cloud can surpass over Amazon EC2 and Rackspace which I have server on both of them. First, I signup with invitation code and set my payment method with credit card. If you have the invitation code like me, don’t worry about billing, HPCloud does not charge in private beta and will give notification if it does. After register my payment method, then I go through with “create server” on Compute — US West 2 – AZ1. You should “activate now” before create cloud server.
It’s pretty simple to create server instance in HPCloud panel. There are several options in create server panel like Size, Security Group, Public IP, Install Image, Key Pair and Instances. I set my Install image into Ubuntu oneiric and default for the other. Only one step taken and your server already build. It’s more simple than EC2 or Rackspace which need a few steps.
After your server ready, now you can start with two important steps :
1. Download key pair (PEM) and you will need it to SSH into server.
To get Key pem, go to https://manage.hpcloud.com/compute, click on “Manage Servers”. Then you should see “Connect” button beside your server. Click on it and you will see link to download your hpcloud PEM.
2. Attach Public IP
When server ready, you will see two of IP ( Public & Private ). You can’t access them from internet because it only available for HP network cloud services. So, you should attach Public IP and you can SSH into this public IP. To attach public IP, click on “Instance” links in “Manage Servers” then go click “Attach Public IP”.
For ssh using keypem, you can use “sudo ssh -i
Now, login into server “standard.xsmall – 1 vCPU / 1 GB RAM / 40 GB HD” :
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 | Welcome to Ubuntu 11.10 (GNU/Linux 3.0.0-12-virtual x86_64) * Documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com/ System information as of Wed Dec 7 04:13:29 UTC 2011 System load: 0.0 Processes: 55 Usage of /: 15.9% of 3.94GB Users logged in: 0 Memory usage: 3% IP address for eth0: 10.4.xxx.xxx Swap usage: 0% Graph this data and manage this system at https://landscape.canonical.com/ Get cloud support with Ubuntu Advantage Cloud Guest http://www.ubuntu.com/business/services/cloud To run a command as administrator (user "root"), use "sudo <command>". See "man sudo_root" for details. |
Top result :
1 2 3 4 5 | top – 04:14:39 up 50 min, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 Tasks: 54 total, 1 running, 53 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni,100.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Mem: 1022232k total, 182668k used, 839564k free, 8364k buffers Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 128820k cached |
Seems it promising things here is the memory & CPU. As we know, Install fresh Ubuntu 11.10 on Micro Instance on EC2 will leave you a little memory & CPU. Some people complaining about it : http://gregsramblings.com/2011/02/07/amazon-ec2-micro-instance-cpu-steal/.
What I don’t like :
1. When go to “Manage Servers”, I see “Create Servers” as first position & “Running Instances” on below. This is a little bit annoying. I prefer “Create Servers” on bottom of “Running Instances” because mostly activity is configuring server rather than create new server.
2. There no Monitoring
What I like :
1. Simple panel and workflow
2. Fast creating server
3. Promising CPU & Memory