Use Cases
Rapid.Space focuses on a few specific use cases common to the Web industry and Enterprise IT. For each use case, Rapid.Space offers a low cost, high performance and ethical solution entirely based on Free Software and Open Hardware.
Use cases include:
Primary backend
A single Rapid.Space VM or a cluster of Rapid.Space VMs is used to host the primary backend of a large corporate ERP, CRM, ECM, DMS or an e-commerce site. Users acces the backend through a global CDN (such as the one provided by Rapid.Space for free). Secondary backend is hosted by another cloud provider. In case of failure of Rapid.Space, secondary backend is switched on.
Secondary backend
A single Rapid.Space VM or a cluster of Rapid.Space VMs is used to host the secondary backend of a large corporate ERP, CRM, ECM, DMS or an e-commerce site. Primary backend is hosted by another cloud provider. Users acces the backend through a global CDN (such as the one provided by Rapid.Space for free). In case of failure of the cloud provider, Rapid.Space backend is switched on.
Big Data Cluster
A cluster of Rapid.Space VMs is configured as a data lake using distributed storage technology (NEO, MariaDB Spider, HDFS, etc.). Parallel computations (machine learning, physical models, deep learning, statistics, image processing, etc.) are distributed on the cluster thanks to data processing frameworks (Wendelin, Spark, Hadoop) based on data science libraries (NumPy, Scipy, Pandas, scikit-learn, OpenCV, MLlib, etc.).
Container Colony
A single Rapid.Space VM is configured to host dozens of containers using some kind of container technology (ex. SlapOS nano-containers, LXC containers, Docker, etc.). Container technology ensures that Rapid.Space VM is efficiently shared between containers. Additional devops (ex. SlapOS resilience stack) automates disaster recovery policy.
Software Development
A single Rapid.Space VM is shared by multiple software developers. Each developer can create multiple development environments using some kind isolation technology (Python's VirtualEnv, SlapOS's WebRunner, Docker containers, etc.). All source code is commited in an external repository (ex. gitlab, github).
Continuous Integration
A single or a few Rapid.Space VMs are configured as nodes that runs continuous integration tests using some Open Source / Free Software technology (Buildbot, Jenkins, Travis, SlapOS Test Runner, etc.). Source code is downloaded from an external repository (ex. gitlab, github), tests are executed inside the Rapid.Space VM and results delivered to the developer.
Performance Testing
A single Rapid.Space VM or a cluster of Rapid.Space VMs is used to launch performance tests on different versions of a library or of an application with different configuration or different algorithms.
Other
Use cases that can not be covered by Rapid.Space can be covered by general purpose cloud providers such as OVH, Online, Hetzner, Qingcloud, UCloud, Aliyun, Rackspace or AWS.
For example, Nexedi (the company behind Rapid.Space), uses Rapid.Space for about half of its infrastructure needs yet relies on the above general purpose cloud providers either to eleminate single points of failure or to cover some needs that Rapid.Space can not cover.