OPEN SOURCE TECHNOLOGIES WE USE

SkySilk is a big proponent of the open source culture, we like the idea of sharing information and code for the betterment of others.

We appreciate the flexibility and transparency that come along with the use of open source technologies that allow for us to create simple, fluid, and secure customized cloud computing environments.

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Proxmox Virtual Environment is an open source server virtualization management solution based on QEMU/KVM and LXC. Users can manage VPS, containers, highly available clusters, storage and networks with an integrated, easy-to-use web interface or via CLI.

SkySilk utilizes ProxMox VE in our Cloud Platform solution to provide clustered, fault tolerant, seamless virtualization management.

Learn more at www.proxmox.com

Ceph storage is an open source scalable distributed file and storage system designed to provide excellent performance, reliability, and scalability, made possible by a global community of passionate storage engineers and researchers. The Ceph storage architecture is very flexible and extensible, enabling block storage (Ceph RBD), file system storage using a metadata server (Ceph MDS), and object storage with both Amazon S3 API as well as Openstack Swift API simultaneously using the same pools.

By utilizing Ceph clustered storage, SkySilk provides highly performant, fully fault tolerant replicated storage solution for our Cloud Platform. Ceph is an SDS, or software defined storage. SDSs are all the rage in the industry because they are portable, have no hardware limits or requirements, and break many limits that traditional storage solutions have for deployment.

In the open source world there aren't many production quality SDS solutions available; we feel Ceph is the most flexible and attractive technology due to its rich feature set and robust design criteria.

KVM (for Kernel-based VPS) is a full virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware containing virtualization extensions (Intel VT or AMD-V). Using KVM, one can run multiple VPS running unmodified Linux or Windows images, each having private virtualized hardware: a network card, disk, graphics adapter, etc.

KVM provides the hypervisor platform that enables virtualization services within the SkySilk cloud platform. KVM is the industry standard open source hypervisor.

QEMU is a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer. When used as a virtualizer, QEMU achieves near native performance by executing the guest code directly on the host CPU.QEMU provides the virtual CPU functionality necessary for KVM to function.

Open vSwitch is a production quality, multilayer virtual switch licensed under the open source Apache 2.0 license. It is designed to enable massive network automation through programmatic extension, while still supporting standard management interfaces and protocols (e.g. NetFlow, sFlow, IPFIX, RSPAN, CLI, LACP, 802.1ag).

OVS provides the virtual networking functionality to the SkySilk Cloud Platform, allowing network segmentation and bridging for customer network isolation and performance.

LAMP, short for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP, is an open-source Web development platform, also called a LAMP Stack. The LAMP Stack uses Linux as the operating system, Apache as the Web server, MySQL as the RDBMS and PHP as the object-oriented scripting language.

All web traffic begins with a hypertext markup language (html) request. The Apache HTTP Server is the software that receives, interprets, and processes that request and responds with a web page. User and application data used by the webserver is stored, queried, and read using a database software (MySQL) and the programming language that generates web pages in response to user input is PHP.

The LAMP stack is the industry standard software that drives the internet. We are proud to employ it for our web services as well as a standard offering in our SkySilk Cloud Platform.

Icinga is a computer system and network monitoring application. It can be integrated with many popular DevOps tools and extended to meet specific needs a developer may have. By utilizing Icinga, SkySilk monitors its network services, host resources, server components and more. It is a powerful tool to help us ensure that everything is running smoothly, and to deliver the best customer experience possible.

Grafana is a metric analytics and visualization suite. It is commonly used for visualizing time series data for infrastructure and application analytics, but has many other uses as well. From heatmaps to histograms, Grafana has a wide variety of visual options to help understand data, all in an aesthetically pleasing format.

At SkySilk, we use Grafana every day to constantly display color-coded graphs on the status of our resources.

InfluxDB is a time series database. It is optimized for fast, high-availability storage and retrieval of time series data. At SkySilk, we use InfluxDB as the backend for Grafana, a powerful open-source data visualization suite.

LXC (Linux Container Technology) is an operating-system-level virtualization method for running multiple isolated Linux systems on a control host using a single Linux kernel. It is the underlying mechanism for most container environments today. LXC allows SkySilk to provide our customers with Containers rather than full Virtual Machines, which provides our users with more access to resources than a fully-fledged Virtual Machine would.

Ansible is software that automates software provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment. It is used to improve the scalability, consistency, and reliability of an IT environment. Ansible is key in managing repetitive tasks, and providing the SkySilk team with more time.