FAQ

The Business Perspective

Below are typical Enstratius™ business questions you may have about the Enstratius solution.

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Q. Is your service a month-to-month model based on usage?
A. Yes.

Q. Do you support more than Amazon Web Services and Rackspace?
A. Yes, Enstratius supports additional public cloud providers such as Windows Azure, GoGrid as well as private clouds platforms such as Cloud.com and Eucalyptus.

Q. Do you provide consulting services to help migrate applications to the cloud.
A. Yes, we can help you review infrastructure, scalability or security needs for your cloud-based application.

Q. Can you track cloud usage by group with billing codes?
A. Yes, you can define a set of billing codes and associate resources for tracking cloud usage/billing.

Q. Does Enstratius support cloud providers globally?
A. Yes, Enstratius works with organizations around the globe such as Amazon Web Services in Europe.

Q. Does Enstratius support private clouds
A. Yes, Enstratius works with the most popular private clouds platforms including Cloud.com, Eucalyptus, Nimbula, OpenStack and VMware.

Q. Does Enstratius provide a free trial?
A. Yes, to register for a free trial, sign-up now.

If you have additional questions, please contact us.

The Technical Perspective

Below are typical Enstratius technical questions you may have about the Enstratius solution.

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Security

Q. How does Enstratius manage keys and user credentials to increase security?
A. Enstratius stores all credentials outside the cloud in a private data center and encrypts all data into the cloud.

Q. What type of encryption does Enstratius use to protect my cloud credentials?
A. Enstratius utilizes the industry standard Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256.

Q. What type of authentication is used to access instances through Enstratius?
A. By default, Linux instances are accessed using the ssh protocol. Windows instances through RDP.

Q. Do Enstratius images come with any type of Intrusion Detection?
A. Yes. We install and configure the OSSEC host intrusion detection system on all Linux-based images. OSSEC alerting is integrated into Enstratius and is accomplished via email.

Integration and Cloud Support

Q. Does Enstratius support SAML and LDAP integration?
A. Yes.

Q. What scripting language do you support?
A. Enstratius supports a range of scripting languages. Most Enstratius customers currently use Bash and Python.

Q. What configuration management tools does Enstratius support?
A. Enstratius currently supports both Chef and Puppet.

Q. Can Enstratius provision cloud resources in different Amazon availability zones?
A. Yes, in fact, it is encouraged to provision resources in multiple availability zones to insulate against potential downtime in any one availability zone. In a clustered environment, Enstratius automatically balances servers across availability zones.

Reporting and Logs

Q. Do you provide audit logs?
A. Yes, Enstratius provides a range of logs for firewalls and other system activity.

Platform Support

Q. Do you support multiple server platforms?
A. Yes, Enstratius has deployed applications on multiple server platforms such as Linux and Windows.

Q. Can I use RAID through Enstratius?
A. Yes. All RAID in the cloud is necessarily software RAID. The most common and most effective method of RAID is RAID 0, which allows for higher performance in some applications. Before operating RAID 0, it is important to have a demonstrated application requirement for doing so.

Q. What Operating Systems do you support?
A. Enstratius supports all major Operating Systems including Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Fedora, Red Hat, Solaris, Windows 2003 and Windows 2008.

Automated Deployments

Q. What is a deployment?
A. A deployments is a logical relationship of multiple server groups. This typically involves load balancers, application servers, and database servers working together. By setting up an automated deployment, you can leverage the auto-scaling and auto-recovery features of Enstratius.

Q. What is auto-scaling?
A. Auto-scaling is when more cloud resources are provisioned automatically using criteria you define. Auto-scaling allows your application to meet the increasing demands of your customers in near real-time.

Q. What is auto-recovery?
A. Auto-recovery is when a cloud resource such a server terminates unexpectedly and Enstratius automatically restores the server from the most recent backup.

Q. Can I use HA Proxy with Enstratius?
A. Yes, it is one of the most common load balancing solutions available and is highly recommended.

If you have additional questions, please contact us.