Kartoza Enterprise Hosting

What differentiates us from other hosting providers?

Our focus is on providing hosting for organisations and governments. If you are an individual looking for a ‘hobby’ deployment, you can probably find more cost effective options from other vendors. In our deployments we focus on having a repeatable deployment process that has high levels of automation. We focus on monitoring with automated tools like Prometheus and support of the deployment with our dedicated DevOps team. We prefer to avoid customising the deployments with organisation specific code so that our deployments can follow upstream as closely as possible, but we can provide custom deployments where needed at an additional cost.

Who uses our hosting services?

Our clients are mainly governments and multinational organisations.

Key elements of our system design

1. Hosting provider: We work with different cloud providers and are building a DevOps framework which is cloud provider agnostic. On our roadmap we will support DigitalOcean (currently supported), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services (all coming soon).
2. Kubernetes: We use Kubernetes, an open source container orchestration management platform to manage the services we deploy. Our deployments are organised into Kubernetes clusters, with redundant controller nodes in each cluster, and then compute nodes (virtual servers) which host client applications. A cluster is a complete orchestration environment and can be multi-tenant or single tenant.
3. Dedicated clusters: In this environment only services for your organisation are deployed to your cluster. This gives you assurance that there is complete isolation of your services from any other client’s services, and flexibility to grow the cluster according to your organisation specific requirements.
4. Multi-tenant clusters: These will be offerings in the future and they will provide a lower price point in return for having your services deployed in a shared infrastructure environment.
5. Dedicated nodes: Within a multi-tenant cluster you may opt to have dedicated nodes (where no other client services are deployed on the same virtual machines as yours). This provides a more predictable service responsiveness for the level of hardware in the node you are renting at the expense of a higher lease cost.
6. Multi-tenant nodes: Alternatively, you can opt to host your services concurrently on the same nodes used by other organisations, optimising on the financial cost whilst also potentially having a less predictable performance for your services.
7. Migration: With Kubernetes we can migrate services between machines (e.g. when we are experiencing heightened load, we can move a heavily utilised service to a larger, more capable machine).
8. Scaling: Additionally Kubernetes provides tooling to allow us to deploy additional, identical nodes with a load balancer in front of them. As demand increases for your services, the load balancer will alternate the routing of requests between the identical nodes allowing you to provide a responsive service even as demand for your services increases.
9. Redundancy: Redundancy speaks to the ability to lose elements of your system without the system going offline / becoming unavailable to your users. Kubernetes and the various cloud providers inherently offer a level of redundancy that you won’t find in ‘single server’ deployments offered by other vendors. The Kubernetes orchestration framework will automatically redeploy any service that goes offline e.g. due to hardware failure. The storage layer of the cloud providers is replicated across multiple disks and can withstand failure of any single hardware component.
10. Backups: Our cloud hosting service includes a daily backup with retention of 15 days.
11. Intimate knowledge of applications being hosted: Within Kartoza, our team members have vast experience in the numerous open source applications available, and can apply this knowledge and experience to deal with problems if and when they arise. We have key expertise in PostgreSQL/PostGIS, GeoNode, GeoServer, Django and the many available open source web platforms for GIS.
12. Price differentiation based on resource usage: All of our pricing plans are based on the number of nodes you need, and the configuration of those nodes. The larger plans should be used when you anticipate hosting larger amounts of data, or have high usage levels on the platforms you provide to your users. We can offer custom plans too should your needs exceed those of our ‘large’ offering - please contact us for pricing.