Togglebox: Leveraging OpenNebula for Customizable Cloud Hosting

In a rapidly evolving cloud hosting landscape, flexibility, customer-focused solutions, and advanced features are essential for standing out in the competitive market. Togglebox, a U.S.-based cloud hosting provider, has been committed to delivering high-performance, highly customizable hosting solutions with a focus on outstanding customer service. The company has found its edge by offering cloud solutions where users can purchase specific resources rather than predefined blocks, setting them apart from traditional cloud hosting providers. For Togglebox, OpenNebula has become an integral part of their cloud hosting platform, enabling seamless management of complex infrastructure and providing a tailored experience for their customers.

Cloud Infrastructure and OpenNebula’s Role

Togglebox runs its own infrastructure, including networking, hypervisors, and storage. OpenNebula serves as the backbone of the company’s cloud management platform, providing centralized control and ensuring smooth operation across their infrastructure.

As Matt Ayres, Owner of Togglebox, explains: “OpenNebula is the glue that ties everything together for us. It plays a critical role in managing all aspects of our infrastructure and allows us to track and meter resource usage for our clients efficiently.”

One of the key reasons Togglebox chose OpenNebula was its flexibility in allowing customers to purchase individual resources (such as RAM, CPU, or storage) based on their specific needs, without being forced into purchasing predefined resource blocks. This level of customization provides significant advantages over other platforms like OpenStack, which mandates resource block purchases.

Collaboration with HostBill

Another crucial part of Togglebox’s infrastructure integration was their collaboration with HostBill, a billing, automation, and client management solutions provider, to develop a custom OpenNebula module. HostBill’s existing billing modules didn’t support OpenNebula, so Togglebox took the step of working directly with HostBill to create a solution that allowed them to integrate OpenNebula seamlessly into their system.

“We’ve been using HostBill for over 20 years, so moving to a different billing system was not an option. We needed a module that could work with OpenNebula and integrate with our existing system. By working with HostBill, we were able to ensure feature parity with our previous platform while improving the user experience.” – Matt Ayres, Owner at Togglebox

The collaboration aimed to ensure that Togglebox’s customers would continue to benefit from all the features they were accustomed to, without limitations during the migration to the new platform. Several features, including VM cloning, automatic snapshot scheduling, disk management, and others, were incorporated into the HostBill module to enhance the user experience.

Key Challenges and Customizations

Togglebox’s commercial model required leveraging additional metrics, which could be extracted from OpenNebula’s extensive API and pushed into the HostBill module, offering the ability to charge for enhanced functionality, such as metered billing for both storage and snapshots—even for customers on a monthly billing plan.

The company also implemented a system that enabled disk snapshots, rather than VM snapshots, ensuring seamless management within OpenNebula’s storage quotas.

Benefits and Outcomes

The integration of OpenNebula and HostBill has provided Togglebox with a streamlined platform that ensures both functionality and ease of use for their customers. While OpenNebula’s native interface, Sunstone, is powerful, Togglebox made efforts to tailor the experience, ensuring that even non-technical users could easily navigate and utilize the platform.

“We’ve made it simple for our customers to interact with the cloud. The interface now only shows them what they need, but we still provide access to Sunstone for power users or advanced tasks.” – Matt Ayres

This user-centric approach has set Togglebox apart from other cloud hosting providers using OpenNebula, as few offer the combination of an intuitive interface with advanced features. Additionally, the integration has allowed Togglebox to provide seamless metered billing, a key requirement for most of their customers.