Questions and Answers

Ridge offers cloud services on the world’s most geographically distributed collection of data centers. Ridge does this by partnering with data centers that are located across the globe. Ridge does not own any of these data centers, but partners with their owners to provide cloud services. Application owners can choose to deploy their services in any of these locations, called Resource Pools.

A Resource Pool (RP) is a collection of compute, network and storage resources owned by a service provider within their own data center.

Ridge Allocation Engine (RAE) is the Ridge Cloud service that is responsible for finding an appropriate resource pool for your workloads (i.e. Kubernetes cluster or container batch). RAE takes into account all the requested parameters and the resource pool (RP) states and characteristics. Some of the considerations are:

• RP resource availability
• RP server type (CPU, memory storage)
• RP location
• RP pricing
• RP compliance with standards (ISO, SOC 2, HIPAA, etc…)
• Requested location
• Requested CPUs, memory, storage
• Requested limit on cost

Managed Kubernetes refers to a service that takes care of the entire lifecycle of a Kubernetes cluster. This includes:

• Cluster creation including both the control plane and the worker nodes
• Constant monitoring of the cluster, auto-healing of control plane and replacement of faulty worker nodes
• Software updates and upgrades of both Kubernetes and the underlying OS

For more information, read our full overview “What is Kubernetes“.

A managed Kubernetes service takes the load off your dev-ops engineers in the following ways:

• The deployment of a highly available cluster requires a single API call instead of a multi-stage, error-prone process.
• High-availability is achieved by setting a parameter in the cluster creation request and does not require any additional effort.
• There is no need to set up a monitoring system and to act upon failures. A managed service monitors the wellness of the worker nodes and the master nodes and performs auto-healing.
• Scaling of the cluster requires a single API call rather than creating and configuring worker nodes.
• Updates and upgrades which may be a complex process are done automatically.

No. Ridge Cloud is a public cloud platform. It does not orchestrate or manage services on other clouds.

RKS is a managed Kubernetes service. You can use it to deploy a cluster in any of the Ridge Cloud locations with a single API request. It offers day-0, day-1 and day-2 operations. The service lets developers deploy certified Kubernetes clusters across the globe. Developers can easily deploy a fully managed Kubernetes service by describing the type of resources, resource pool characteristics, price and geographic locations they wish to use.

RCS delivers a programmatic method for developers to easily deploy containers in resource pools across the world. Developers can specify: container images, scale of deployment, type of resources, data center characteristics and locations. RCS provides access to external public clouds. RCS also provides robust monitoring of operations and delivers the ability to publish container logs to any endpoint.

Simply sign-up for a Trial Account. You will receive credentials for an administrator account. Sign in with these credentials to create projects and IAM groups. Invite users to join, associate them with a group and define permissions for the group. Now you are ready to create Kubernetes clusters and container batches anywhere on the Ridge Cloud.

With Ridge you can now deploy your workloads in multiple locations, at a city level, distributed around the world using a single API. Our massive distribution gives you the ability to run your application close to your users for higher performance, and to be fully compliant with local data sovereignty regulations regardless of your users’ locations.

Ride’s partner network is comprised of data centers, ISPs and carriers around the globe. Each partner is a leading cloud provider in its region. While Network Partners have all implemented different cloud technologies, our customers access Resource Pools through one unified, simple API. Simply set your constraints in the Ridge Allocation Engine or choose any specific Resource Pool you’d like to use, and let us do the rest.

While logged in to an Admin account, you can invite users to become members in your organization. The user will receive an email and by clicking the link will be able to register and become an active member in your organization. You can associate this user with a group (recommended) and add permissions to the group or the specific user (less recommended).

You will be billed according to consumption of resources, no surprises and no hidden fees.

Our platform is able to provide a full pay-as-you-go experience per minute of usage. Ridge Cloud works on-demand, and we charge according to the amount of vCPU, vRAM (and sometimes other resources like networking) times minutes in operation.

At the first stage of the platform we will be providing an invoice and payment will be done through bank transfers in addition to providing SEPA and ACH payment options. Later on we will enable and require a credit card for deployment and charge automatically.  

Invoice period is from the 1st of each month to the last day of the month and will be provided within 14 days from month end.

The Ridge Allocation Engine provides a few options to control where your workloads will be placed:

• Select one or more Resource Pools. The system will place your workload in one of the specified Resource Pools making the selection based on available resources.
• Select a geographic location. If, for example, you select a country, the system will find a resource pool that matches all your requirements (such as available resources and compliance considerations) and offers the lowest price.
• Exclude certain geographical locations. The system will search all the other locations for a best-match.
• If you don’t care where the workload will run, you can let the system pick the best resource pool for you.

Absolutely. You can specify the conformity requirement as part of your request for a Kubernetes cluster, container batch or storage. In fact, you can specify multiple requirements. For example: HIPAA,GDPR and SOC 2.

See the detailed guide.

Yes, Ridge offers a managed Kubernetes cluster. This means that we take care of the cluster’s control plane. You can see the worker nodes that you created. You can also delete and change the number of desired worker nodes. You can’t do this for master nodes.

Should a worker node fail, the system will identify this and bring up another worker node in its place. It will delete the failed node and you will no longer be charged for it. The new node will have the same characteristics as the failed node and it will automatically join the cluster.

No. A cluster will have all its components in a single resource pool. You can create multiple clusters in multiple geographies.

Yes. You create one or more node pools for your cluster. Each node pool has a parameter indicating the desired number of nodes. If you increase this number a new node will be created. You may also decrease the number and delete the specific nodes that you no longer want in the cluster (you should first evict all the containers from these nodes).‍

Using the web UI, you can generate credentials. The output of this action will be displayed on the screen and you may copy it and use it for your kubectl configuration. This information includes the cluster endpoint, the cluster’s certificate and your own authentication token.

You will need to generate an access token for each user you wish to add to the system. Provide this token to the user. If the user is a  member of your organization in Ridge and has the appropriate permissions, they will be able to generate their own token.

Yes you can. Behind the scenes, the cloud provider component that Ridge installed on your cluster will make a request to Ridge, Ridge will create a load balancing function in the resource pool where your cluster is located. It will configure worker nodes as the targets for the protocols and ports that were specified in the service definition in Kubernetes. It will also take care of all the security aspects so that only the desired traffic reaches your cluster.

Yes. Your cluster is installed with a Ridge CSI plugin. This plugin will make requests to Ridge which in turn will create, attach and delete block-storage volumes in the resource pool where your cluster is running. You may see the volumes that were created for your PVCs in the UI.

When you create a batch you can specify an endpoint for an Elastic Search server. For example, set elasticsearch_endpoint to  http://elasticsearch.example.com:9200

All the container logs of this batch will be sent to this endpoint.

You can provide Ridge with AWS credentials  which can be  used for programmatic (API) access. These credentials will be stored securely on Ridge’s infrastructure and will never be transmitted,

The information you will need to provide is:

• The region where these credentials are valid, e.g. us-west-2
• Access Key Id
• Secret Access Key

When you create a batch of containers you can specify the role it will need to assume and the identifier of the above credentials. The system will provide temporary credentials to each of the containers. The AWS client in the containers will fetch these credentials just like it would if it were running in AWS. Therefore no development effort is required on your part.

No. Just once. Use the UI or the API to enter the docker registry credentials. You will need to specify:

• The registry’s URL
• A username
• A password

These credentials will be stored securely.

When you create a batch(er) you can reference these credentials by name or ID

At Ridge, all your clusters run in a private and isolated network environment. Unlike other clouds, you do not have to set up this environment. A separate networking environment is automatically created for each of your clusters. Ridge also takes care of all the firewalling and NAT rules that the cluster needs.

Still have a question ?  Don’t hesitate to talk to one of our experts