Skip to main content

Your submission was sent successfully! Close

Thank you for signing up for our newsletter!
In these regular emails you will find the latest updates from Canonical and upcoming events where you can meet our team.Close

Thank you for contacting our team. We will be in touch shortly.Close

  1. Blog
  2. Article

Arturo Suarez
on 9 July 2015

Introducing utility pricing to your Managed Private Cloud


Canonical is proud to introduce one of the most exciting, on-demand, usage-based consumption models yet – and it’s for our managed private cloud service, BootStack.

While public cloud, consumption-based pricing has changed the economics (for the better) of how companies and individuals procure compute resources, private clouds have continued to remain stagnant in how they are procured. Much like traditional IT – with pricing, design and payment terms specified on a relatively inflexible per-customer, or per-host, or per-CPU basis, etc. – the traditional model has some benefits to some customers, but it’s not ideal for everyone. It also makes it difficult for customers to compare “apples to apples” when deciding on new technology implementations. Canonical aims to change all that.

To address this need we introduced a new pricing per VM/hour model for our OpenStack support and managed clouds during Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote at the last OpenStack Summit in Vancouver.

Its rationale is based on a new service-centric way of consuming IT. We’re effectively extending the utility-based consumption model that the public cloud vendors adopted for public IaaS into the platform and application domains of private clouds. An IT department can now easily calculate the cost of running any service during a defined period of time just by knowing how many units (VMs or containers) make up that service (out of the box information if you are using Juju).

As BootStack increases the number of technical and financial choices available and makes its way into different industries (Telco, Legal, Financial Services), we’ve been looking for different ways to help our customers make the right choice of OpenStack consumption model.

The model is simple:

  • per virtual machine running per hour running on your cloud, regardless of the size.
  • per GB of storage used (not usable, not available, but consumed without taking into account replicas)
  • Both are fully managed, built and operated to a SLA with no upfront payment.

Do the math and you’ll find out that you can now reach interesting economics in the Cloud at a much smaller scale than with the regular private cloud pricing. You can now compare directly to your public cloud expenditure providing you have a good cost allocation model of the underlying hardware.

Now that you’re able to compare “apples to apples” on pricing you can now focus on the main benefits of your fully managed OpenStack private cloud: control of your infrastructure, innovation by default, interoperability, no vendor lock in and no investment in hiring scarce (as in expensive) skilled engineers.

If you want to know more about BootStack pricing and sizing and whether this model is appropriate for your particular case, do not hesitate contacting us and we’ll be happy to assist.

Related posts


Video: Managed OpenStack upgrades

Cloud and server Videos

The process of upgrading OpenStack releases can be challenging, given the many moving parts and the cadence of releases. In this use case video, Juan Carliante, Cloud Reliability Engineer for Canonical explains how Canonical’s BootStack  Engineering team solves issues arising during the upgrade process quickly using Juju, an open-source a ...


Ellen Arnold
11 November 2016

Webinar: Secure, scale and simplify your OpenStack deployments

Cloud and server Article

In our latest on-demand webinar, we explore how we can build and manage highly scalable OpenStack clouds with BootStack, Juju and PLUMgrid. Arturo Suarez, Product Manager for BootStack at Canonical, and Justin Moore, Principal Solutions Architect, at PLUMgrid, discuss common issues users run into when running OpenStack at scale, and how t ...


Alexia Emmanoulopoulou
7 October 2015

BootStack managed cloud factsheet

Cloud and server Product business card

BootStack, is a the fully managed cloud offer from Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu. BootStack is a true end to end offer including the design, implementation, and ongoing management of an OpenStack cloud on Ubuntu, followed by an optional transfer of the management function to the customer if desired. The cloud will be built on Ubunt ...