{"id":97893,"date":"2023-09-18T13:56:59","date_gmt":"2023-09-18T12:56:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/?p=97893"},"modified":"2023-09-25T10:09:33","modified_gmt":"2023-09-25T09:09:33","slug":"flow-offers-alternative-solutions-to-the-swiss-market","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/2023\/09\/18\/flow-offers-alternative-solutions-to-the-swiss-market\/","title":{"rendered":"Flow offers alternative solutions to the Swiss market"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

How can a local cloud service provider stay relevant and compete with the big hyperscalers? We talk to <\/strong>Bojan Jovanovic, Flow Swiss Co-founder, about the company\u2019s new underground data centre location and its success selling premium cloud services designed for the <\/strong>Swiss <\/strong>market.  <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flow Swiss was established in 2009 and is still run by its founders. Flow offers a range of premium as-a-Service (aaS) cloud products, including Mac-as-a-Service (one of the company\u2019s first offerings), Kubernetes and DevOps hosting, compute cloud, object storage and Platform-as-a-Service for scalable, container-based application hosting. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Swiss sovereign cloud<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

An important part of the Flow Swiss approach is its focus on sovereign cloud. Microsoft and Google have had Swiss locations for a few years and AWS fully entered Switzerland in November 2022, but the growing trend is for companies to seek cloud services from locally owned companies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn Switzerland the term \u2018sovereign entity\u2019 is becoming more and more popular and people are beginning to think carefully about the companies they outsource their data to,\u201d said Jovanovic. \u201cYour data can be encrypted, fine, but if for some political reason, for circumstances outside your control, your provider removes your access to it\u2026 you\u2019re in a bad place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOf course, this isn\u2019t the purpose of these big US hyperscalers, they\u2019re in business to make their stakeholders happy, but I think people underestimate the potential risk here. And this is why we focus on Swiss cloud for the Swiss market.\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Carbon neutral data bunker<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flow\u2019s cloud services are hosted in two state-of-the-art Swiss data centres, the first in Zurich and the second at ALP2, an all-new facility in Luzern. Adding new meaning to the term \u2018data protection\u2019, ALP2 is a high-security data bunker under the Swiss Alps. It guards client data against every imaginable risk, from extreme weather events to electromagnetic pulse radiation.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As well as giving customers the \u2018cool factor\u2019 of having their data in an underground bunker, ALP2 elevates the term \u2018carbon neutral\u2019 from a vague buzzword to a real commitment.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cActually, the really special thing about this data centre is the CO2 neutrality,\u201d said Jovanovic. \u201cIt is powered by sustainable energy, mostly hydropower and it is cooled by water taken from deep in an alpine lake. The heat produced in the data centre is exported to the nearby city, where it is used to heat apartments and houses. It’s a whole cycle of energy reuse. It is very Swiss, so well organised and it\u2019s just amazing.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Be like a boutique bakery<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having that sovereign Swiss service is important, but building a successful cloud business in a market dominated by the large cloud players requires Flow to stay innovative. In fact, the company has actively decided not to compete directly with the hyperscale providers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe have to be more creative and offer a nicer alternative, a more personal boutique service,\u201d said Jovanovic. \u201cIt\u2019s like bread. Not everyone wants to buy bread from a supermarket, it\u2019s just not the same as something hand-made by a local baker. We\u2019re a lot like that in our relationship with hyperscalers. Their bread isn\u2019t bad, but they work on a bigger scale \u2013 they can\u2019t do things like ALP2 or offer the quality alternative cloud our customers want.\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Would you like containers with that?<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Containerised application development and hosting is a hot trend in the cloud industry. Flow offers managed Kubernetes hosting, which makes it easy to deploy, manage and scale Kubernetes clusters on demand. Meanwhile, its App Engine service uses efficient, lightweight system containers to automate DevOps processes and host applications on infrastructure that is easy to deploy and scale. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere are use cases where Kubernetes makes sense, no doubt about that, though I think that companies underestimate the investment it needs,\u201d said Jovanovic. \u201cJust operating Kubernetes, even without any application, takes a lot of resource and as the environment grows, they have to hire more people and suddenly their costs are exploding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat\u2019s why App Engine is perfect for many SaaS companies and digital agencies. They need infrastructure that is fast, efficient and scalable, but they don\u2019t typically want to spend a lot of time managing that infrastructure.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The value of Virtuozzo<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flow\u2019s compute cloud, managed Kubernetes and storage services run on Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure, while its App Engine runs on the Virtuozzo Application Platform, which was formerly known as Jelastic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Virtuozzo technology stack is essential to us. As a young company we would never have the resources to be able to develop our own platform and offer these innovations to our customers,\u201d Jovanovic said. \u201cWe\u2019d need three times more people, expensive skilled people that are hard to find.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flow also appreciates the fact that the Virtuozzo cloud stack is built on open-source technologies.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe love that it\u2019s OpenStack-based,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s an industry standard and it is open, but with Virtuozzo it is fully supported and we can actively work with the team there to keep improving it and develop features that suit the way we bring cloud services to the market.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A unique cloud experience<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Using Virtuozzo as the foundation Flow has created its own customer portal for cloud services, leveraging Virtuozzo\u2019s OpenStack API to integrate its services in a simple, friendly way.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSimplicity is so important in this market and it\u2019s another way we offer something different to the hyperscale providers,\u201d said Jovanovic. \u201cOur portal lets you provision and manage everything in one place, whether it\u2019s KVM virtual machines, Kubernetes or object storage running on Virtuozzo, or even our bare metal Mac hosting services. And we have some very cool features coming to make the user experience even better.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n



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How can a local cloud service provider stay relevant and compete with the big hyperscalers? We talk to Bojan Jovanovic, Flow Swiss Co-founder, about the company\u2019s new underground data centre location and its success selling premium cloud services designed for the Swiss market.   Flow Swiss was established in 2009 and is still run by its founders. Flow offers a range of premium as-a-Service (aaS) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":97894,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,55,18793,27,10046,93,24],"tags":[19053,25,6391],"class_list":["post-97893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cloud","category-data-centres","category-europe","category-intelligent-technology-newsletter","category-switzerland","category-top-stories","category-used","tag-bojan-jovanovic","tag-cloud","tag-flow"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97893"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98360,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97893\/revisions\/98360"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/97894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}