We’re pleased to announce our latest cloud service – Zenlayer Virtual Private Cloud – aimed at streamlining your business operations by letting you interconnect and group your Zenlayer Bare Metal Cloud instances so that they’re easier to manage.

A virtual private cloud (VPC) gives you the security and reliability of a private cloud along with the flexibility, superior scalability, and ease of management offered by a public cloud.

What is a VPC, and how does it differ from a private cloud?

At its core, you can think of a VPC as a private cloud within a public cloud. It’s similar to a private cloud in function. Instead of being hosted and maintained on-premises in the way of traditional company-owned data centers, however, VPCs are hosted off premises by a public cloud provider. If desired, a VPC can also serve as a secure, convenient bridge between your public and private clouds to form a hybrid cloud.

In a VPC, encryption, tunneling, subnets, virtual local area networks (VLANs), and other networking technologies are used to create an isolated cloud within a multi-tenant cloud environment that is not shared with anyone but the VPC user.

It should be noted that one key area of difference between VPCs and private clouds is cost. An on-premises private cloud is typically more expensive to deploy and maintain and requires a hefty upfront investment into dedicated infrastructure.

Smaller businesses that wish to set up their own private cloud often run into resource limitations like the costs of hardware upgrades and replacements, server licensing, general maintenance, and IT personnel needed to ensure that all of the above runs smoothly without interruptions. In addition, dedicated physical space and a robust security setup are essential to keep the stack protected.

Why do I need a VPC?

Less upfront costs
In contrast to the plethora of costs and resources detailed above that are needed to set up a private cloud, Zenlayer VPCs are completely free to provision for your Bare Metal Cloud instances. Our pay-as-you-go model lets you turn your organization’s capital expenditure (capex) into operating expenses (opex), which not only frees up valuable funds to increase cash flow, but also makes future spending predictable to simplify your billing.

As a bonus, we don’t charge ingress (data transfer in) or egress (data transfer out) fees between your instances within the same VPC.

Highly scalable
Since your VPC is hosted by your public cloud provider, you don’t need to worry about upgrading or purchasing hardware when scaling your applications or services. Using an intuitive dashboard like our zenConsole, provisioning additional resources is as simple as a few clicks. You can easily add instances to your VPC, batch update those instances, and upgrade to more powerful servers on demand at drastically lower costs than it takes to scale a private cloud.

Easier to manage
A VPC lets you more easily manage the network between your instances within a public cloud provider. If you had five instances and wanted them to communicate with each other without a VPC, for example, you’d have to manually configure each instance’s IP address and route individually. A VPC lets you batch configure those instances to deploy firewalls, load balancers and perform other management functions. As you can imagine, this saves a lot of time and effort – especially if your business runs off many instances.

In addition, when you provision a VPC with Zenlayer, we can group all your available bare metal instances under the same subnet within a region. This lets you seamlessly connect to other Zenlayer services, VPCs in other regions, data centers, and your public and private clouds. In other words, Zenlayer VPC can conveniently serve as your complete network infrastructure management solution.

How do I start using Zenlayer Virtual Private Cloud?

You can easily provision your own VPC using zenConsole. For detailed instructions, check out our VPC Quick Start Guide. If you need additional assistance or have any questions, feel free to reach out to our solution experts and they’ll happy to help you find your ideal business solution.

New to Bare Metal Cloud? Check it out now!

Instantly deploy your applications on high-performance, dedicated physical servers close to your users – now available in 59 cities across 6 continents.

If you’ve never used our bare metal cloud, check it out! Delight your users with lower latency, and smoother, more responsive experiences. Sign up for our self-service zenConsole or contact our sales team to get started!