Carrenza gives cloud customers greater control

Cloud service provider Carrenza has updated its portfolio with a new development environment for its platform-as-a-service customers, while organisations taking advantage of its infrastructure-as-a-service can now opt to manage the infrastructure themselves if required.

Available from today, Carrenza's Virtual Datacentre portal enables customers to have greater control over any workloads they migrate to Carrenza's Cloud Hosting Service.

"It's an evolution of our current platform, and lets customers have as much or as little control as they want," said Nick Barron, sales and marketing director for Carrenza.

The move is designed to reassure customers that may have concerns about using cloud services to host some business processes.

Using the web-based portal, customers can take control of their own firewall or load balancing, or even remove Carrenza from the day-to-day management of their cloud-hosted infrastructure entirely.

"We found it's about a 50:50 split between those who want more control, and customers who are happy to call us to spin up another virtual machine," Barron said.

Carrenza is also extending its platform-as-a-service offering for developers with a new Application Development and Deployment (ADD) platform that includes developer tools as well as automated development environments, version control and continuous integration.

"We're packaging all of the tooling needed to do development work into one easy user interface that enables you to set up a project with LDAP user permissions, with granular access for who has permission to push out the staging and live versions," Barron explained.

ADD is also available from today, but has been in beta trials with selected customers for about five months.

Carrenza's customers include Sport Relief and Comic Relief, which typically operates using about 20 virtual servers, but this can ramp up to 400 or more during Red Nose day, Barron said.