Fine-tuning your workspace with Frame
Leveraging cloud resources for your organization is not only more cost-effective — the right platforms will allow you to scale swiftly and adjust dynamically to accommodate any level of usage. There are plenty of reasons to modernize your workspace: scalability, security, and elasticity are just a few.
Keeping it simple
The Frame platform was built from the ground up for the cloud, leveraging AWS and Azure hyperscale infrastructure that is globally available to deliver any application to any browser. Frame was designed with the capability to serve from 5 to thousands of concurrent users. Frame achieves this by using a 1:1 VM-to-user ratio, unlike typical RDS scenarios which consist of many users sharing one physical system or virtual machine.
Whether you’re a yearbook teacher accommodating classes of varying sizes using graphically-demanding software or a financial software vendor trying to keep up with the high demand of your product, you can dynamically scale based on user demand — instantly.
Surely something so comprehensive must be complicated, right? Nope! Unlike traditional VDI providers, ramping capacity is easily done from your Dashboard.
There are three key parameters that you use to specify your system’s elasticity:
- Minimum: The minimum is the minimum number of instances powered on and ready to accept sessions at a given time.
- Buffer: Extra available instances that are available to a user within seconds.
- Maximum: This setting defines the maximum number of concurrent users you expect. This number is the largest number of instances that you will allow your system to automatically scale up to, based on user demand. Essentially, this is a “cutoff” that specifies the size of your account’s “pool” of instances.
If you needed to multiply your number of seats by 5x with traditional VDI solutions, you’d be looking at a days and weeks to wait for the hardware to arrive (not including the time to set up, test, and integrate into the cluster). On Frame, quintupling your number of available seats would probably take around 30 minutes.
Ahead of schedule
The granularity doesn’t stop there, either. From the same page in your Dashboard, you can also set “Scheduled Exceptions.” There are plenty of use-cases that require some exceptions to be made for elastic scaling parameters for certain times/days of the week. A CAD teacher may want to set his minimum and buffer to 0 at night when there aren’t any classes scheduled. He can also accommodate for his largest class of the week by setting a higher min for only that time and day of the week, which would look something like this:
The final analysis
The Frame platform doesn’t just let you control elasticity and usage, it also allows you to monitor usage over the life of your account. For instance, if you would like to see how many hours were used over the course of days, weeks, months, or even years — you can do that! The Analytics page on your Dashboard gives you the same level of granularity for viewing usage that you have for setting it. For example, this is the hourly usage for a Frame customer over the course of a single month. For this example, we’re showing hourly usage for all usage types and instance types.
If you find that you only need to see the usage for your production users using a Pro 16GB instance type, just select the variables you’d like to change from the drop down menus.
Frame allows you to analyze prior trends so you can better adjust your capacity as you go along. Essentially, better control over usage equates to better control over cost — and that’s important!
IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) providers continue to build more datacenters in new places all over the globe, doing the heavy lifting so startups and enterprises alike can minimize complexity and “get stuff done.” Public cloud services have lifted the boundaries originally set by legacy solutions. Now, you have the option to expand your business with the confidence of knowing that you’ve future-proofed it.
You can read on about elasticity settings and scheduled exceptions with Frame by checking out our documentation here. Check back again for more tips and information or send us your questions at info@fra.me!
