We’re excited to announce the immediate availability of the Horizon cloud management portal for our Next-Generation AgileCLOUD nodes in North America and Europe. This new portal provides an additional set of tools to manage cloud infrastructure with OpenStack-specific features. OpenStack power users will appreciate the ease of use and flexibility provided by Horizon. Those who rely on the OpenStack API for specific features will be excited to have an OpenStack-native interface to complement our AgileCLOUD portal.
In our initial launch of Horizon, it will provide native access to several unique OpenStack features described below. As Next-Generation AgileCLOUD evolves, the Horizon dashboard will provide access to more features until they are ported into our mainstream customer portal.
1. Security groups
Security groups will enable simple role-based layer 3 and layer 4 firewall management rule sets that can be applied to one or more instances. Instead of managing firewall permissions on each server instance, security groups can be set with predefined firewall rules and then can be applied to groups of servers as needed.
2. SSH key management
If your organization practices SSH Key Management for access to infrastructure, you’ll want to start using it with Next-Generation AgileCLOUD right away. As you launch new instances, you can immediately apply SSH public keys (created within OpenStack or uploaded from your existing keys) so that you can provide immediate access to authorized users.
3. Configurable VLAN management for server groups
Internap has always provided public and private VLANs for AgileCLOUD customers. Now you have more flexible configuration options, by creating instances that should only be used on a private network (such as a Database server). Combine this with security groups to provide extra access control over your infrastructure.
4. Advanced volume management
Many of our customers have asked for more advanced volume management. Of course you can still choose between a local ephemeral storage disk and a persistent root volume, but now you can create additional persistence block storage disks and attach them to your server instances. Use this to provide additional data storage, or use software RAID to stripe/mirror your disk volumes.
5. Instance resizing
Instance resizing allows you to resize your server instance to a new/different configuration. For example, if you start with a small configuration but later find you need to increase the CPU and memory, resizing it will allow you to apply the new resources in minutes.