CloudFlex is a solution for businesses that need accurate, replicable and accessible environments on-demand. CloudFlex provisions environments on demand, using user-defined templates to maintain consistency, within minutes.

 

 

 

 

• Costs - Only pay for what you use; there is no setup fee for each environment, and no limit to how many environments you can run. Compared to physical machines, the advantages are clear; Even if you are already using cloud services, CloudFlex offers significant savings by providing simple scheduling management. Don't get caught out by surprise cloud bills, caused by environments accidentally being left to run needlessly.
• Save time & effort - CloudFlex is designed to be easy to use for anyone, regardless of technical expertise or cloud experience. The template wizard sets up environments with ease, and gets them up and running within minutes. 
• Control - See exactly what environments are running from the CloudFlex dashboard and stay on top of your environments. Simplify the management of environments from one screen.

 

 

At present, CloudFlex works as a layer on top of Amazon Web Services Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) to provision computing power from the Amazon cloud. There are several types of machine available, varying in memory & power, and running on various Windows and Linux server based operating systems (see AWS site for details). CloudFlex uses access keys provided by Amazon to control an EC2 account via the API. The end user uses CloudFlex's clean, intuitive interface to provision, manage, pause and stop machine instances and environments. Virtual machines can be remotely accessed and cloned directly through the CloudFlex interface. Simply put, CloudFlex offers a simple way to control all aspects of the cloud relevant to test environments.

 

 

While cloud services are touted as cost effective due to their "pay for what you use" price plans, they are only cost effective when care is taken to only provision resources when necessary, as 24/7 usage of cloud computing power will run up considerable expense. CloudFlex has built in mechanisms to control these often unexpected and always unwelcome costs. Attaching predetermined lifespans to environments, or automatically stopping errant environments at the end of the working day are just some of the ways CloudFlex can be used to intelligently stay on top of cloud expenditure, in a way that is predictable, manageable and achievable.