COUNTRY FOCUS : SWITZERLAND
“ Actually , the really special thing about this data centre is the CO 2 neutrality ,” said Jovanovic . “ It is powered by sustainable energy , mostly hydropower and it is cooled by water taken from deep in an alpine lake . The heat produced in the data centre is exported to the nearby city , where it is used to heat apartments and houses . It ’ s a whole cycle of energy reuse . It is very Swiss , so well organised and it ’ s just amazing .”
Be like a boutique bakery
Having that sovereign Swiss service is important , but building a successful cloud business in a market dominated by the large cloud players requires Flow to stay innovative . In fact , the company has actively decided not to compete directly with the hyperscale providers .
“ We have to be more creative and offer a nicer alternative , a more personal boutique service ,” said Jovanovic . “ It ’ s like bread . Not everyone wants to buy bread from a supermarket , it ’ s just not the same as something handmade by a local baker . We ’ re a lot like that in our relationship with hyperscalers . Their bread isn ’ t bad , but they work on a bigger scale – they can ’ t do things like ALP2 or offer the quality alternative cloud our customers want .”
Would you like containers with that ?
Containerised application development and hosting is a hot trend in the cloud industry . Flow offers managed Kubernetes hosting , which makes it easy to deploy , manage and scale Kubernetes clusters on demand . Meanwhile , its App Engine service uses efficient , lightweight system containers to automate DevOps processes and host applications on infrastructure that is easy to deploy and scale .
“ There are use cases where Kubernetes makes sense , no doubt about that , though I think that companies underestimate the investment it needs ,” said Jovanovic . “ Just operating Kubernetes , even without any application , takes a lot of resource and as the environment grows , they have to hire more people and suddenly their costs are exploding .
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