Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider OnApp today announced the OnApp Federation, a worldwide public cloud running on the hardware infrastructure of its 167 service provider customers. The network offers compute resources in 170 locations covering 113 cities across 43 countries (see map below). The heart of the cloud is an online market that allows OnApp’s 900 service provider customers to rent infrastructure from each other at a mouse click.

This, says OnApp Chief Commercial Officer Kosten Metreweli, gives OnApp’s service providers and potential private corporate users worldwide reach rivaling AWS, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, IBM SoftLayer, and HP Helion. Many of OnApp’s users are regional players who have been cut out of the large corporate market that needs global service availability. Initially OnApp worked with its customers to create a content delivery network (CDN), competing with companies such as Akamai, that allowed them to provide services to each others’ customers.

The new market is the next step, says Metreweli. “This allows a service provider to offer global reach to customers who need it without giving up control of their customers to providers in those other geographies. As far as the end customer is concerned, they get a single view of the service.”

To them it appears that their service provider is operating in all the locations where the customer needs service, giving them one bill to pay and one contact to maintain.

Taking on AWS, other market rivals

OnApp’s service providers now compete directly with AWS and other global providers for business. “When a customer says, ‘Well, I should deploy on Amazon because I get 12 availability zones,’ the service provider now can say, ‘If you deploy with us, you’re able to get hundreds of availability zones.’”

This market is already giving rise to a new kind of service provider, Metreweli says, one with no investment in hardware whatsoever, that provides its services on top of the existing hardware of the OnApp Federation members, basically abstracting the software services from the hardware layer.

OnApp is also offering services to multiple cloud environments, including OpenStack. This further abstracts the hardware and software layers, with OnApp’s management platform running across the environments. It opens the Federation to hybrid cloud business from companies who, for instance, want to extend the reach of their private clouds to service small remote offices.

Graphics courtesy OnApp