Compute Engine

Live Vertical Scaling

Resource management in real time

Scaling up without rebooting–flexible and cost-efficient

Compute Engine / IaaS

Live Vertical Scaling to cushion traffic peaks

You will have to alter the resource configuration of your virtual data centre on the fly in order to respond quickly to changes such as traffic peaks. Our Live Vertical Scaling helps you do just that. Live Vertical Scaling uses hot add or hot plug procedures to let you boost resources like RAM and the number of cores without rebooting the system. This way you can use the full flexibility of the cloud while ensuring optimized performance at an unbeatable price.

Finger pointing to a illuminated display of graphs and data

Scenario in a physical data centre

What happens when there is an unexpected surge in traffic on your website? Your servers grind to a halt, your customers are unable to connect, and your revenues take a tumble. This is a real predicament if you are running a conventional data centre: You will be forced to shut down the server, at least briefly, to increase the resources at your disposal. In the meantime the backlog will pile up that could easily overload the server when it is powered back up. Compute Engine

with Live Vertical Scaling puts an end to this problem in your virtual data centre.

Icon: Dedicated resources: Server rack with checkmarks

Vertical scaling of RAM and CPUs at the push of a button

All it takes to add resources to your server in the Compute Engine is the operation of a slider. The Data Center Designer (DCD) graphic interface lets you increase the fine-grain power of the cores and RAM.

This is possible as you are working inside a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC). The capacities for your virtual data centre are sourced within the physical data centre's complete hardware pool. This software control means we can deploy fresh capacities in real time, whenever you need them. The procedure allows vertical scaling on the fly, so the addition of new CPU cores and more RAM. You can add up to 62 cores and 240 GB of RAM (AMD CPUs) for each VM, i.e. 27 Cores and 120 GB RAM (Intel CPUs).

Scale up – Vertical scaling for quick availability

Scaling up – so the vertical addition of server resources – works smoothly, whichever operating system you happen to be using. MySQL registers the new capacities without requiring modification. In other words you can benefit directly from the boost in performance. This is the advantage over scale out, so horizontal scaling by adding more server instances: Infrastructure with horizontal scaling is more complex, sometimes requires extensive and therefore costly code modifications and is unable to increase performance in a fully linear fashion.

We provide you with a free Ubuntu-based operating system image to make sure that the convenient server management also works without a hitch on your virtual servers in the Compute Engine. ACPI (advanced configuration and power interface) events are used to signalise to the system during live operation that new processor cores were added. This means that the system does not have to be rebooted – physically or virtually.

Cutting costs with Live Vertical Scaling: Pay-per-use

Although high performance even during load peaks is indispensable, business owners still need to keep an eye on the costs. Our pricing system is just as flexible as the server resources: With Compute Engine, you only pay for the services that you actually use. That’s why there are neither long-term contracts nor prefab packages with capacities that exceed your actual requirements. Our IT resources are booked by the minute. For you, this means: The minute the load peaks has passed and you reduce the capacities, you will no longer have to pay for the performance.

Server management using an API interface

You are not reliant on the Data Center Designer (DCD) in order to manage your virtual data centre. Our Cloud-REST-API means you can access the entire configuration, even without the graphic user interface. For instance you can write scripts to automate your scaling: So you can throttle the system performance at night to release capacities that you do not need. An effective way to save money. In our DevOps community, you will find a large number of micro-services that let you automate your infrastructure just the way you need it.

More about the Compute Engine